In the evolving world of cloud computing, Zadara stands out with its approach to storage and compute services. The company, founded 12.5 years ago by a team of entrepreneurs with a history of successful ventures, offers solutions designed to meet the demand for improved performance and security in public cloud storage.
We had the opportunity to speak with Shawn Yakely, Sr Director of Global Strategic Enterprise Accounts at Zadara. With over eight years of experience at the company, Shawn shared insights into Zadara’s offerings and their vision for the future.
“When we started, AWS and Rackspace were the major players in the market,” Shawn recalls. “We identified a need for on-premise services that could offer improved performance and security. We focused on providing storage solutions that met these needs.”
Zadara’s model is consumption-based, differentiating it from companies that rely on what he called creative financing. “Our system scales up and down based on the storage used,” Shawn explains. “This flexibility is one of the advantages we offer to our customers.”
Zadara also offers compute as a service, which they call Edge Cloud – essentially a private cloud. “We provide services where the public providers are not,” Shawn says. “We aim to provide more secure and better-performing solutions.”
Zadara’s services are particularly beneficial for Managed Service Providers (MSPs). Traditionally, MSPs have to invest capital to buy hardware and infrastructure, hoping their sales team can fill it. Zadara offers an alternative approach. “We start with a small configuration in 500 sites, in data centers all over the world. MSPs can sell into any of these and get paid full margin,” Shawn explains. “They can also become part of our federated edge, getting paid a percentage of anyone who leverages their site. They don’t need to buy the hardware.”
This model is advantageous for multinationals, allowing them to access data centers on 5 continents. However, Shawn admits that one of their challenges is name recognition. “Our goal is not to have everyone selling our solution. We try to find one to three in a region who are true partners. Other models make it tough to make money because there is too much price competition.”
Zadara manages the services for the partners, or they can manage it. “We do 24×7 follow the sun support to free up partners and end users from needing a storage specialist,” Shawn says. “This allows MSPs to be strategic when working with their clients.”
Zadara’s offerings are designed to stand out in the market. “EMC, IBM, NetApp, HP have as-a-service offerings,” Shawn acknowledges. “But we provide a critical differentiator because you pay less when you shrink.”
Zadara provides physical isolation at the drive layer, providing drives dedicated to specific customers, which offers better performance and is more secure. “Data is at a minimum on 2 storage nodes,” Shawn exclaims. They make software only and use Supermicro as a hardware vendor, customizing to the environment. “This allows customers to get the best tech and lower cost,” Shawn adds.
Looking to the future, Zadara is focusing on their Edge offering. Their storage has all flash and HDD with caching, because not all apps need flash. They also provide S3-compliant object storage and are rolling out Kubernetes soon. “This is a performance-based object storage solution,” Shawn concludes.
With products like zStorage, zCompute, and Zadara Object Storage, Zadara is well-positioned to continue being a leader in the cloud computing industry. Under the experienced leadership of new CEO, Yoram Novick, Zadara is set to become profitable this summer. As Shawn Yakely puts it, “Zadara is not a widget. It is a solution.” And it’s a solution that’s shaping the future of storage and compute services he explained.
Zadara’s commitment to innovation and customer service is evident in their approach. They offer low-latency edge services with their existing fully-managed clouds or global base of 300+ MSP partners. They provide secure-by-design infrastructure, data protection solutions, and a global network of partners. With click-to-provision options for dedicated storage, Zadara helps ensure data isolation and security.
Their approach to consumption-based pricing, physical isolation at the drive layer, and flexible scaling options make them a compelling choice for businesses seeking to optimize their cloud storage and compute services. With a presence on 5 continents and a commitment to disrupting the traditional models of cloud service provision, Zadara is a company to watch in the coming years.
Aside from his role as CEO of TMC and chairman of ITEXPO, Rich Tehrani is CEO of RT Advisors and a Registered Representative with and offering securities through Four Points Capital Partners LLC (Four Points) (Member FINRA/SIPC). RT Advisors is not owned by Four Points.
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