UK Starcom Opts for Zadara VPSA Storage

Zadara Storage Ltd, a provider of enterprise storage-as-a-service (STaaS), and Starcom Technologies Limited announced that Zadara’s Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA) platform has been selected by Starcom to replace their EMC VNX and NetApp FAS storage arrays.

The VPSA solution will support their VMware- and Microsoft-based applications in data centers located in Europe and North America.

Starcom is a UK supplier of integrated business systems for the retail, manufacturing and distribution sectors. As part of a strategic IT infrastructure review, Starcom investigated the enterprise storage vendors for alternative solutions. After a rigorous evaluation, Starcom selected the VPSA solution to support their ERP, CRM, business Intelligence and e-commerce, hosting and managed services businesses.

By leveraging Zadara’s On-Premise as a Service (OPaaS) solution, they gain the benefits of an OpEx, pay-as-you-go model, but with the control of having the storage reside physically inside their data centers. With Zadara’s data protection features including snapshots, clones, replication and data encryption, the Starcom team are comfortable that their critical data is protected.

To add an additional level of HA, they are deploying Zadara’s Multi-Zone HA feature between data centers, which provides metropolitan failover should one of their data centers suffer a catastrophic failure. To provide the highest levels of performance, Starcom is implementing Zadara’s endpoint iSER connectivity option between the VPSA storage and the compute servers.

“We chose Zadara Storage because they provided the enterprise performance and data protection features necessary to support our critical applications,” said Steve Donaghue, director of hosting services, Starcom. “By implementing the Zadara iSER option, we are seeing 33% more IO/s in our VMware environment. We found their On-Premise as a Service offering to be far more flexible and cost-effective than the EMC and NetApp products we had been using. Additionally, we recognized significant savings by moving from a CapEx charge to an OpEx consumption approach that complements our business model.“

“We have monitored Zadara Storage for several years and are impressed with both their technology and their ability to stay ahead of the competition,” said Simon Robinson, research VP at 451 Research LLC. “As the industry continues to adopt an as-a-service model, we are not surprised to see more and more companies aligning with Zadara to leverage their VPSA architecture.“

“Starcom is an excellent customer for Zadara and we are pleased to welcome them to the family,” said Dani Naor, VP, international sales, Zadara. “With the Zadara VPSA platform they are able to offer their customers a truly enterprise, on-demand cloud platform with comprehensive HA features and a guaranteed QoS.“