I would like to see them be a little bit more proactive in terms of the patches and updates that are available. I would like to see more disclosure and information around what fixes or what enhancements are available within a patch, and help in coordinating and scheduling that. Right now, it's driven more by the customer in reaching out via a support ticket. It would help if they were more proactive in identifying what changes are available.

We've been working with them on a few things that they can improve and they are actually working on a prototype for us. We have gone live with it as a pilot, and that is offering iSCSI as a service but via the internet, versus a cross-connect cable. If this is something that they can offer out of the box, that would be amazing. They do offer it to us right now as a custom solution but it's not offered to everybody.

The value is not something that I cannot put a dollar figure on but it would allow them, or anybody else who needs to consume storage from Zadara, to effectively attach themselves to a volume that provides a block of storage, quite literally without any further investment.

They can do it right away by having a secure VPN tunnel into Zadara's point of presence and just consuming as much storage as they need to. If they do that, they would dominate the market in a big way because it will reduce the barrier of entry to using Zadara. Right now, to use Zadara, you have to go through some hoops.

Having iSCSI over the internet using a VPN, the IPSec tunnel is really the only thing that I find missing from this product.

The management interface is more geared towards end-users rather than a service partner like ourselves, and there are improvements that can be made around that.

The reporting tool is nice and I think that it's good; however, it would be a little better if it were more feature-rich. It would be nice if, as a customer, we could see more of the analytics that we know Zadara can see on the platform.

There are still some storage features that they lack. For example, other vendors implemented the auto-tiering feature a long time ago, while Zadara Storage Cloud is just coming out with this feature today. So, they are a little bit late compared to the market.

Some of the features are a little bit slow to come to market. For example, we've been talking about Object replication for some time, and it's now nearly available. I wouldn't really say that anything is in need of improvement, although it would be good if they could speed up development on some things.

It was a pity that Zadara didn't offer compute services three years ago because we had to invest in a completely different platform. It would have been nice to have the whole service from Zadara. While they have launched their offering now, it was just a bit too late because we had already made the investment.

In the next release, there can be some improvements to the web console by adding more features because the console is simple. Additionally, the calculator could improve.

The range of support of VMware could be better. It can support Windows, however, it cannot support other operating systems like IBM AIX. This needs to improve.

We're looking for platforms for implementing object storage. If Zadara can have that, similar to what they have in Amazon, the S3, that would be ideal. If they have APIs, I would like to see that feature be available, similar to the way an S3 or a Ceph object storage protocol. That could be developed or provided on top of the platform.