We had a lot of issues with the Zadara recently regarding performance, reports, and offloads, the customers could not send backups to Zadara. However, at the moment, the problems have been solved. Overall Zadara is a useful solution that provides good services. I rate Zadara an eight out of ten.
I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using currently. We're like partners, however, we're not a direct partner. We have a common customer. I'd advise new users to make sure that the operating system where they are going to provision the storage has compatibility and interoperability prior to implementation. You need to know you are at the right firmware level, so you don't have any surprises as far as the compatibility. I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.
Chief Technology Officer at HARBOR SOLUTIONS LIMITED
Real User
2021-03-22T15:35:00Z
Mar 22, 2021
In summary, I think that this is an absolutely great product. It provides that mix of use and it also helps in these uncertain times, where if your capacity drops or, as in our case, it increases, then it has the ability to flex and scale with you. I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.
Be upfront with all of the specific requirements and needs that you're looking for, and really think about the future. Think about what growth is going to look like and what performance is going to look like; not just right now, but in a year, three years, five years, and 10 years from now. Zadara has a significant number of capabilities as well as services. Knowing your strategy when you build that environment, and knowing what that strategy could be for increasing the size of not only the volumes but also the virtual private storage arrays—knowing how easy that is—was something that was very beneficial for us. We knew that our workload was going to grow substantially every year, and even every month. Having that plan was truly helpful for us, not only because we knew what our storage requirements were going to be, but because we knew how we would be able to satisfy them with Zadara. How would we upgrade those VPSAs? What does that upgrade process look like? In our experience, we have been able to upgrade those very efficiently. And in almost all cases it resulted in no downtime. We were able to do most of those migrations and transitions behind the scenes. Knowing what those capabilities are, how that would work, and being able to have those conversations upfront, reduced a significant amount of the stress that would typically be associated with trying to manage the amount of data that we do. They have support for multiple protocols. We primarily leverage NFS support. We've been very happy with the level of support with that. There are multiple versions that we've leveraged in testing to see what additional performance we can gain from going from NFS version 3 to 4 to 4.1. Zadara has been on the cutting edge with the availability of those additional versions and support for them. They offer CIFS as well as the iSCSI support but we typically don't leverage that. The on-premises configuration is less important to us. One of our main, driving factors was getting away from on-premises equipment and the management and overhead costs associated with having to purchase that type of hardware. One of the benefits of working with the Zadara is that they handle all of those upfront costs and that they have the hardware and can scale on demand. Similarly we have typically moved away from co-lo facilities as well. Leveraging the disaster recovery by having multiple locations hosted by Zadara was a much greater driving factor for us.
Zadara is a powerful enterprise-level storage solution whose design enables it to handle every aspect of a user’s data storage needs. It can be deployed in any location, using any protocol, and storing any data type that an organization requires. With Zadara, organizations can do everything that they were able to do with more traditional systems in a cheaper and more efficient way.
Zadara Benefits
Some of the ways that organizations can benefit by choosing to deploy Zadara...
We had a lot of issues with the Zadara recently regarding performance, reports, and offloads, the customers could not send backups to Zadara. However, at the moment, the problems have been solved. Overall Zadara is a useful solution that provides good services. I rate Zadara an eight out of ten.
I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using currently. We're like partners, however, we're not a direct partner. We have a common customer. I'd advise new users to make sure that the operating system where they are going to provision the storage has compatibility and interoperability prior to implementation. You need to know you are at the right firmware level, so you don't have any surprises as far as the compatibility. I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.
In summary, I think that this is an absolutely great product. It provides that mix of use and it also helps in these uncertain times, where if your capacity drops or, as in our case, it increases, then it has the ability to flex and scale with you. I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.
Be upfront with all of the specific requirements and needs that you're looking for, and really think about the future. Think about what growth is going to look like and what performance is going to look like; not just right now, but in a year, three years, five years, and 10 years from now. Zadara has a significant number of capabilities as well as services. Knowing your strategy when you build that environment, and knowing what that strategy could be for increasing the size of not only the volumes but also the virtual private storage arrays—knowing how easy that is—was something that was very beneficial for us. We knew that our workload was going to grow substantially every year, and even every month. Having that plan was truly helpful for us, not only because we knew what our storage requirements were going to be, but because we knew how we would be able to satisfy them with Zadara. How would we upgrade those VPSAs? What does that upgrade process look like? In our experience, we have been able to upgrade those very efficiently. And in almost all cases it resulted in no downtime. We were able to do most of those migrations and transitions behind the scenes. Knowing what those capabilities are, how that would work, and being able to have those conversations upfront, reduced a significant amount of the stress that would typically be associated with trying to manage the amount of data that we do. They have support for multiple protocols. We primarily leverage NFS support. We've been very happy with the level of support with that. There are multiple versions that we've leveraged in testing to see what additional performance we can gain from going from NFS version 3 to 4 to 4.1. Zadara has been on the cutting edge with the availability of those additional versions and support for them. They offer CIFS as well as the iSCSI support but we typically don't leverage that. The on-premises configuration is less important to us. One of our main, driving factors was getting away from on-premises equipment and the management and overhead costs associated with having to purchase that type of hardware. One of the benefits of working with the Zadara is that they handle all of those upfront costs and that they have the hardware and can scale on demand. Similarly we have typically moved away from co-lo facilities as well. Leveraging the disaster recovery by having multiple locations hosted by Zadara was a much greater driving factor for us.