Zadara Reviews

We have several use cases for this product. Zadara provides the hardware and we build our services that are hosted on it.

They are responsible for building out the cloud hardware infrastructure and for us, it's a number of nodes and a number of disks attached to those nodes, with compute to manage everything. It also includes network infrastructure like switches for our data center.

They shipped all of the hardware to us, we installed it, and then we began to provide services with the support of Zadara. They share responsibility in management, providing the monitoring and management and the backend operations.

In some cases, we have just sold pure storage to our partners and customers. In other cases, what we provide is Infrastructure as a Service, which includes compute off of another platform that we have that isn't from Zadara, and the backend storage is with Zadara.

We also provide other services, including Backup as a Service. We provide the service with Veem as the backup solution. The backups are taken from the customer's environment and put onto Zadara storage in our data center.

We also offer disaster recovery as a service, where we provide the compute and the storage for disaster scenarios. A customer can spin up their entire environment on the VMs in our compute, and then their data is backed up and snapshotted into our storage on Zadara.

Having dedicated cores and memory absolutely provides us with a single-tenant experience. We have use cases in both categories, but we have customers who have a completely dedicated and private environment and it is particularly important for them. For example, if they are dealing with medical or patient data then they have a dedicated core and a dedicated disk, which is essentially their own private cloud.

It is important that we also have the flexibility for some of the lower-end services that we can have multi-tenant storage because not all of our clients require completely dedicated cores and disk space.

It is very important to us that Zadara provides various drive options because we're more of a niche cloud player, and we don't compete with Azure, AWS, or other large providers. We tend to have bespoke solutions, so having the different drive options gives us the flexibility we need to do that.

Zadara has improved our business with the main benefit being that we generate quite a bit of revenue every month from the services that we provide others, and I don't think that would have been possible without this product. What really attracted us to Zadara was the fact that they have the pay as you grow model.

As a new cloud provider, say three years ago, it would have been quite a large investment for us to take on. Not just in the hardware but also in the skills and the knowledge required to set up and operate it. Zadara was a key enabler for us to be able to enter the cloud business because if it wasn't for them, it would have taken us a lot longer. We would have had to invest in more people and as well in more hardware. As it is now, we are generating revenue and it gives us some credibility with our larger customer base.

Although we only use cloud storage services, Zadara is an agile solution that offers compute and networking, as well. This agility means that they are very quick at turning things around, which is key for us because we're able to implement solutions for customers quite quickly. Ultimately, we can start bringing in revenue for sales quite fast, as opposed to some of our traditional business. 

If you take fiber, for example, it could take up to three months to realize the value of the sale before it actually starts to build. Whereas with Zadara, it is so agile and so quick and easy to set up that even in a few days, we can turn a sale around into billing. This quick conversion from sale to revenue is also important for the business.

We didn't have a cloud before we had Zadara so, in that regard, it has increased our performance by 100%. In fact, we have been able to redeploy people and budgets to more strategic projects because it helped us to enter the cloud environment and to offer new services to our customers.

The most valuable feature is the different tiers of storage, as it allows us to do some nice bespoke things. Depending on what the customer wants to do, we can provide those three different tiers of storage. This is good because we can be competitive with the pricing so that we're not overselling the high-end storage every time.

A nice feature is the immutable object storage, which can be used in conjunction with Veeam. This was something that they brought out more than a year ago and is quite nice, in particular for our customers who are using our Backup as a Service. This is a USP that we have at the moment.

The ability to take almost instant snapshots is very attractive for us because we are able to expand. Currently, we have one cluster in our data center and we're going to build out a second multi-zone environment in another data center. The snapshots are attractive because we've got very high-speed, dark fiber between those two locations. It means that we can do almost real-time replication between Zadara centers, which will allow us to create some really nice solutions for our customers, particularly for disaster recovery.

It is important that Zadara supports multiple protocols, although, for some of our customers, it's completely over their heads. From the cloud engineers' perspective, it is very important because they are able to architect the solutions in the way that they wish. I wouldn't necessarily say that it is a key USP when we go to customers, however.

It is an advantage that this product integrates with all of the public cloud providers and private clouds, although it isn't the highest thing on our priority list.

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.

I have been using Zadara Storage Cloud for approximately three years.

Stability-wise, it's very solid and we've had no issues.

We have dozens of customers and I cannot easily estimate the scale of their usage. With respect to our organization, there are many people who use Zadara, and the roles are varied.

Starting from the front end, we have the salespeople that are out there trying to sell our cloud services, and supporting them are the solution architects. The solution architects will be deeper into the technology and they help to design solutions. For example, they scope out opportunities and gather requirements. Often, they interact with Zadara to ask questions and for help to design certain bespoke solutions.

Then, working backward, there are the senior cloud engineers and they would typically get deeper involved in the design of the customer's environment. They would also then do any of the complex builds.

There is also a team of what we call tier-two Net Apps. These are engineers that set up the customer's environment, in particular for the more standard configurations.

Finally, there is the NOC, who monitors the platform and takes any calls from customers if there were ever any issues.

Anytime we have any questions or we need support, they always have very senior people that are there and willing to help us.

The fact that the cloud services come with 24/7 management is something that's critical for us. For example, the team at Zadara has highlighted issues to us before we've noticed them or highlighted potential issues before they become issues. This gives us that confidence to backend our SLA to our customers on the service that we're getting from Zadara.

Having this level of support and their expertise has made it easier for our NOC, as well. While we have senior cloud engineers, we didn't need to train all of the lower-level engineers and then the NOC team to be experts in this product. If there's ever an issue with us, we have that support of Zadara in the background.

We did not have another similar solution before Zadara.

I was not with the company when it was deployed, but through feedback from the people who were, my understanding is that the initial setup was very straightforward.

The deployment process took only a few days.

Zadara worked with the team during the initial setup, and I can see it now as we're about to deploy another zone. They helped the team to define what it is that they actually need and really bring a lot of knowledge to us, helping to design the solution.

Zadara takes a lot of things into consideration, like the networking that's available, issues like latency, and what kind of environment it is going into. Then, they put together the design themselves, and then they sent over all the equipment to our data center. From there, they walked through everything with the engineers, including the physical setup, and they would have done all the testing and everything to make sure that it was all working sufficiently and before it was brought live.

Although it is difficult for me to estimate ROI, I can say that it's a pay as you grow model, so we haven't had to make a large investment in storage-related hardware. It means that anything that we have and anything that we paid Zadara for, we're making revenue from a customer.

To be clear, we will only implement storage for a customer once we have them. In this regard, given that we have had to invest very little, the return has been very large.

I can't say it saved us money because we didn't have this service before Zadara, but if we had to invest ourselves then it would have cost us a lot of money. Assuming that we would have broken even on the hardware by this point, three years later, when you consider the support and other factors, it would probably take a lot longer.

The pricing is relatively straightforward. There are a lot of different combinations and permutations and so on, but I think that's just more the nature of the business rather than something that is Zadara-specific.

It is a nice licensing model and it makes it quite simple because we just pay for what we use, and the bill that comes shows us exactly what customers are using what resources. It is very standard and straightforward.

Cost-wise, because it's a pay-per-use model, it may ultimately end up costing us more in the long run than something we developed ourselves.

This solution can be configured for on-premises, co-location, and cloud, although the option is not as relevant to our use cases. We've never used the on-premise solution and most of the time, if we're speaking with customers, they say they want to move to the cloud. As such, our focus has been on the cloud, primarily. We've never tried to sell this as an on-premises solution, or as a data center solution as a standalone. We have always looked at it from the bigger picture, which is that we're selling services off of our cloud.

This is a product that I recommend, in particular for organizations that are just entering the cloud market. If we had been offering cloud solutions for years, or if we'd been in something similar, we might not have gone down this route because probably over time, it'll end up being more expensive for us because it is a pay-per-use model. This is in spite of having very good discounts from Zadara. Again, for anybody who's moving, and is quite new to this environment, this is a really good way to go and to start building up your knowledge with that support in the backend.

It is important to remember that this product would reduce the risk as well. Specifically, there would have been a certain risk for us in taking on this new product in this new service area, requiring us to invest very heavily in it. Instead, the risk for us was lowered quite significantly because we didn't have to make that initial investment.

We have proven that it was a good business decision because we are making healthy revenues from it, but we didn't know that three years ago. Overall, it is a relatively risk-free way of entering into this business.

In summary, Zadara is a good product and they're fairly on top of the storage game. We're very happy with them and we have no intention of moving to another provider.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We are running Zadara in three of our data centers.

We're a data protection organization so we back up a lot of customer's data. We use Zadara largely in one of three ways. This first is an Object storage platform in our data centers, the second is for Block storage, for a specific product that we have, and the third is for on-premise customer object storage. In the third case, when we're backing up a large amount of data from a customer's site, we put a local Zadara appliance on that customer's site as well.

Our initial application was probably the simplest one. We were sunsetting a product, but we needed to do some movement and we needed some additional storage, but we knew that what we needed was going to change within six months as we got rid of one product and brought in another. To handle this, we started deploying Block storage with Zadara, which we then changed to Object storage and effectively sent back the drives related to the Block storage as we did that migration. This meant that we did not have to invest in new technology or different platforms but rather, we could do it all on one platform and we can manage that migration very easily.

We use Zadara for most of our storage and it provides us with a single-tenant experience. We have a lot more customer environments running on it and although we don't use the compute services at the moment, we do use it for multi-tenant deployment for all of our storage.

I appreciate that they also offer compute services. Although we don't use it at the moment, it is something that we're looking at.

The fact that Zadara provides drive options such as SSD, NL-SAS, and SSD Cache is really useful for us. Much like in the way we can offer different deployments to our customers, having different drive sizes and different drive types means that we can mix and match, depending on customer requirements at the time they come in.

With available protocols including NFS, CIFS, and iSCSI, Zadara supports all of the main things that you'd want to support.

In terms of integration, Zadara supports all of the public and private clouds that we need it to. I'm not sure if it supports all of them on the market, but it works for everything that we require. This is something that is important to us because of the flexibility we have in that regardless of whether our customers are on-premises, in AWS, or otherwise, we can use Zadara storage to support that.

I would characterize Zadara's solution as elastic in all directions. There clearly are some limits to what technology can do, but from Zadara's perspective, it's very good.

With respect to performance, it was not a major factor for us so I don't know whether Zadara improved it or not. Flexibility around capacity is really the key aspect for us.

Zadara has not actually helped us to reduce our data center footprint but that's because we're adding a lot more customers. Instead, we are growing. It has helped us to redeploy people to more strategic projects. This is not so true with the budget, since it was factored in, but we do focus on more strategic projects.

The most valuable feature is the flexibility in terms of deployment options. For example, we typically use Block and Object storage types, but we've also used File storage in the past as well. It also gives you the ability to turn on different features, easily.

There's a simple cost model for everything. It's not like some more traditional storage vendors where we need to go and buy more hardware or pay for three years worth of software licensing, et cetera. We pay for what we use for the month we use it.

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.

We have been using Zadara Storage Cloud for approximately two years.

This acts as our primary object storage, so it is used pretty extensively. Stability-wise, we've not had any particular issues. We've had a few drive failures and other things that you would expect, but overall, no stability issues.

We have six people that work with Zadara directly. Our engineering team uses it for product development, our head of infrastructure runs the data center, and the infrastructure team works with it regularly.

We're an organization that runs 24/7, so the fact that Zadara comes with 24/7 management is hugely beneficial to us. Particularly on the customer deployments, the fact that we don't have to worry about those environments, where traditionally we'd have to look after them, means that we can focus on running our core backup technology rather than worrying about the underlying storage.

Overall, the support has been very good, both during our initial deployment and post-deployment. We've had no issues that they were not able to resolve and we have no problems with them whatsoever. Our account team is based in the UK and the support team is in the US.

Prior to Zadara, we were using NetApp. We replaced it because it was very old, out of support, and Zadara gave us the ability to not invest in hardware that we weren't going to need.

The initial setup was straightforward and the deployment didn't take very long.

Zadara largely took care of the deployment for us, so we didn't have to do anything. Our operations team coordinated the process with them.

When it first came in, we had it for one specific use case that was very easy. For that, we knew exactly how we were deploying it and it's evolved over time.

We have seen a return on our investment with Zadara storage, and it's because it has enabled us to deliver almost limitless capacity. As our business grows, we haven't had to have issues with forklift upgrades of storage, et cetera. It's enabled a very linear growth within our team and has meant that we haven't had to add any resources to the support team from our side to deal with that growth.

The pricing and licensing are very simple and the cost is predictable, although, like everything that you pay for as you use, you have to be mindful of what you're using. Much like the public cloud, if you leave stuff on there that you don't need, then the bill continues to grow. Outside of that, which isn't specific to Zadara, it is very good, very easy, and we have no concerns whatsoever.

Using Zadara has saved us CapEx and large upfront expenditure. 

I had used Zadara for a number of years in a previous organization, so I knew what they were and we brought them off of the back of that.

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.

We are a disaster recovery company and we used Zadara as a storage platform for all of our disaster recovery solutions. We do not make use of the computing and networking services they offer. Rather, we only use the storage facility.

Our main environment is Zadara Storage, and then we have multiple VMware and Hyper-V virtual clusters that run the services we provide to our customers. We've also got numerous recovery platforms as well, which we can recover customer's environments onto. Zadara is a key underpinning of that because, without that common storage layer and the services running on top of that, we wouldn't have a business to run.

It's key for us, as a DR specialist, that we have the confidence that all of our systems and services are available all the time. Picking a vendor, be it Zadara or any other vendor, is really important to us because we have to trust that they're going to be there 24/7, every day.

We use Zadara as a multi-tenanted experience and it is key to us that we have dedicated resources for each tenant because it maintains a consistent level of performance, regardless of how it scales.

The fact that Zadara provides drive options such as SSD and NL-SAS, as well as SSD Cache, is very important because we need that kind of performance in our recovery environments. For example, when the system is used in anger by a customer, it's critical that it's able to perform there and then. This is a key point for us.

At the moment, we don't use the NFS or CIFS protocols. We are, however, big users of iSCSI and Object, and the ability to just have one single solution that covers all of those areas was important to us. I expect that we will be using NFS and CIFS in the future, but that wasn't a day-one priority for us.

The importance of multi-protocol support stems from the fact that historically, we've had to buy different products to support specific use cases. This meant purchasing equipment from different vendors to support different storage workloads, such as Object or File or Block protocols. Having everything all in one was very attractive to us and furthermore, as we retired old equipment, it can all go onto one central platform.

Another important point is that having a single vendor means it's a lot easier for us to support. Our engineers only need to have experience on one storage platform, rather than the three or four that we've previously had to have.

It is important to us that Zadara integrates with all of the public cloud providers, as well as private clouds because what we're starting to see now, especially in the DR business, is the adoption of hybrid working from our customers. As they move into the cloud, they want to utilize our services in the same way. Because Zadara works exactly the same way in a public cloud as it does on-premises, it's a seamless move for us. We don't have to do anything clever or look at alternative products to support it.

It is important to us that this solution can be configured for on-premises, co-location, and cloud environments because it provides us with a seamless experience. It is really helpful that we have one solution that stretches across on-premises, hybrid, and public cloud systems that looks and works the same.

An example of how Zadara has benefited our company is that during the lockdown due to the global pandemic, we've had a big surge in demand for our products. The ability of Zadara to ramp up quickly and expand the system seamlessly has been a key selling point for us, and it's somewhat fueled our growth. As our customer take-up has grown, Zadara's been the backbone in helping us to cope with that increased demand and that increased capacity.

It's been really easy to do, as well. They've been really easy to work with, and we've substantially increased our usage of Zadara. Even though we've only been using it for just about five months, in that time, we've deployed four Zadara systems across four different data centers. Their servicing capacity has been available within about four weeks of saying, "Can you do this?" and them saying "Yes, we can."

With respect to our recovery solutions, using Zadara has perhaps doubled the performance of what we had before. A bit of that is because it's a newer technology, and a bit of that is also in the way we can scale the engine workload. When the workload is particularly high, we can upgrade the engine, in-place, to be a higher-performance engine, and then when the workload scales down, we can drop back to a lower-performance one. 

That flexibility in the performance of not only being able to take advantage of the latest flash technology but also being able to scale the power of the storage engines, up and down as needed, has been really good for us.

Using Zadara has not at the moment helped to reduce our data center footprint, although I expect that it will do so in the future. In fact, at this point, we've taken up more data center footprint to install Zadara, but within six months we will have removed a lot of the older systems. It takes time to migrate our data but the expectation is that we will probably save between 25% and 30%, compared to our previous footprint.

This solution has had a significant effect on our budgeting. Previously, we would have had to spend money as a capital expense to buy storage. Now, it's an operational expense and I don't need to go and find hundreds of thousands of pounds to buy a new storage system. That's helped tremendously with our budgeting.

Compared to the previous solution, we are expecting a saving of about 40% over five years. When we buy new equipment, our write-down period is five years. So, once we've bought it, it has to earn its keep in that time. Using Zadara has not only saved us money but it will continue to save us money over the five years.

It has saved us in terms of incurring costs because I haven't had to spend the money all upfront, and I'm effectively spreading the cost over the five years. We do see an advantage in that the upfront capital costs are eliminated and overall, we expect between 30% and 40% savings over the lifetime if we'd had to buy the equipment.

The two most important things about this solution for us begin with the flexibility of it. It's very easy to expand and compared to other storage systems that we've used, it's a lot more expandable and a lot more flexible in how it's deployed.

The other big thing for us is there's no large capital outlay to buy it. You just pay for the amount of the system that you're using, which is quite important for our business, because that means that we can align our usage with what our customer needs are. This is unlike other storage vendors that we've used. We're not wasting any capacity because we have to buy it in fixed components, in fixed sizes. We can just turn on as much as we need for what we're doing at the time. Essentially, the pay-as-you-go approach means that we are not overpaying or pre-paying for capacity that we are not using.

Zadara absolutely provides us with predictable costs and it's quite a straightforward and simple pricing model. It is very easy for us to predict what the costs are going to be at the end of each month.

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.

We are new customers and have been using the Zadara Storage Cloud for five months.

Stability-wise, it's been really good and we've not had any issues with it.

It's done everything that we expected it to do, so we've been quite pleased with that. We've recently gone through and had a version upgrade and that was very easy, as well. There was no downtime and it all went really well.

Overall, it's exactly how we thought it would work and what we were hoping for.

So far, I would characterize Zadara's solution as elastic in all directions. We've got four physical systems and we have to expand those both in terms of their physical capacity and the sizes of the engines that we're using with them. It does seem to scale very well.

From a cost perspective, being able to scale up or down as needed throughout the month is very important to us. We are providing services to customers and as customer requirements change, the ability to change our usage to match our contractual obligations is essential. So, being able to closely align the two is really nice, from a budgeting point of view.

This has enabled us to be more efficient and more agile, both to support our customers and also from a financial point of view.

From our experience, Zadara as a vendor provides proactive monitoring and support. We've used other tier-one storage vendors, and Zadara's support has been on-par or better than the others. It's what we were expecting from an enterprise storage vendor and they haven't disappointed in delivering that. They're always there when needed and they're very quick to respond, so we've been really pleased.

For example, they've given us more warning than our tools did of projected storage usage, so as to advise us on upgrading. Also, because of the way their storage works on their storage engines, they've been able to give us a heads-up as to when it would be best to upgrade those engines to the next size. Again, this has made for a seamless experience. Ultimately, we've been able to scale the capacity and performance of the platform working in tandem with Zadara as and when we needed it. It has been very effective for us.

Prior to Zadara, we used NetApp, which is another tier-one storage vendor. 

The initial setup was quite straightforward. Our storage requirement was well-defined from the existing legacy vendors that we used and as part of the engagement process with Zadara, it was quite comprehensively covered from what we required and how they would provide it. When it came to deploying, it was a really pain-free experience.

The length of time for deployment has improved as we've gained experience. The first one took us four weeks and the most recent one took approximately two weeks. We've learned a lot and Zadara has as well. Overall, it was fairly painless and very quick to do, and certainly a lot quicker than what we've experienced in the past with other vendors.

Our implementation was completed in two phases. One was the traditional storage side, using our SCSI, which was fairly easy to deploy because we understood that side very well. It is quite easy to set it up and configure and then start migrating customer data over. As we are a virtual environment, the tools within the hypervisors we use made that process really easy to do.

The object storage that we're using was also easy to set up, as it is with every object vendor. They have a slightly different look and feel for how they implement object storage, so that took a little bit longer to do, but again, was fairly easy.

We're in the process of migrating data onto the object storage platform at the moment, which isn't as easy as just doing standard disc to disc copies. That's mainly around the tooling that's available to move data from one object platform to another.

We had one project manager who looked after all four deployments, and team-wise, we had a network engineer and two storage specialists who were involved throughout. Out of their time, over the deployment phase, the first one took approximately 10 man-days to complete over the four weeks, and the subsequent ones, with time frames of two weeks each, took us perhaps four or five man-days per deployment.

In general, it was fairly lightweight. We could have gotten away with one storage engineer, but as it's a new platform, we wanted at least two people to be involved from our side during the deployment. This would give us two people skilled in how it works.

Those two have subsequently passed on their knowledge to the rest of the storage team. But again, it's a fairly small, dedicated storage team that we have. Overall, it wasn't resource-intensive at all.

There is not really any post-deployment maintenance. Zadara does a lot of proactive monitoring for us and they offer full 24/7 monitoring of the solution and managing any faults, et cetera, that come along with that. From our side, we probably perform 20% to 25% less management of the platform than we did previously.

This is included in the fees and it allows us to concentrate more on the admin tasks that need doing, rather than having to concentrate on monitoring, et cetera. With Zadara's involvement and them being actively engaged in the monitoring, it means that we don't have to be as actively involved as we would be for other platforms. It is really nice.

On our legacy systems, if we were doing an upgrade, that would all be up to us to do. With Zadara, we keep a watching brief and they do all of these upgrades in the background. That is also a very good plus for us because again, we don't need to be actively involved in those kinds of tasks. They're taking care of them for us.

Like everybody, we'd like it to be cheaper, but that isn't going to happen. For our use, it's appropriately priced and overall, it's proved to be very cost-effective against other tier-one vendors.

The commercials on it are better than what we had before with our traditional vendors but really, it's the flexibility of its use that pays dividends. I don't feel that I'm wasting money by having to grow a capacity that I don't need. By comparison, that's the way a traditional vendor would sell it.

A traditional vendor will sell you a fixed amount of storage whether you can use it on day one, or you have to wait two or three years to use it. That's a waste of both capital and storage systems.

From that point of view, it is useful and has also a knock-on effect on the environment that we run Zadara in. Specifically, I'm not wasting power and cooling, et cetera, to run pieces of equipment that I don't really need.

When we were considering Zadara, we also looked at upgrading our NetApp to the latest version. We also looked at what EMC had to offer.

The storage market is very mature at the moment, so in terms of features, there is very little difference in the features that each vendor offers. With Zadara, the two main selling points for us were one, it wasn't a capital purchase so we could buy what we needed when we needed it; and two, everything was all in the one product.

If you look at the likes of NetApp and EMC, while they have solutions that cover everything, generally, if you wanted object storage and traditional storage then you'd have to buy two solutions, because that's how the market's developed for them. They have different products to cover different areas.

It's really nice with Zadara that it's just one platform that does everything, and it's been designed from the ground up to do that. I think that NetApp and EMC will go down that route as well, but they have a lot of legacy engineering which makes that more difficult for them to do.

The summary is that Zadara won out because of its pricing model and the fact that it was a common storage platform that does everything.

My advice for anybody who is looking to implement Zadara Storage is to "Give it a go." It's a different model compared to everybody else, and it can take you out of your comfort zone if you're used to purchasing legacy storage systems because it works in a completely different way. Also, Zadara isn't as well known in the marketplace as the likes of EMC, NetApp, or IBM, et cetera.

For us, it was very easy to test out all of the functionality of Zadara and make sure that it ticked all the boxes for what we wanted, using it in the public cloud to start with. Testing everything ensured that it was a good fit, both technically and operationally, and that gave us the confidence to then move on to an on-premises PoC. From that point, we bought the product.

The fact that it's a single product that stretches from the public cloud to on-premises was quite key for us in our purchasing decision, because it meant that we could easily try it and buy it in a public cloud and just get a handle on what it could do for us before we attempted on-premises testing. The on-premises testing was really just about confidence in the performance of it compared to our existing on-premises solutions.

We were very comfortable with the product at that point because we'd been able to play with it in the cloud. It was just a last tick in the box, that it would deliver on the performance that they claimed it would do, and it did.

In terms of lessons learned, when we were initially talking to Zadara, we had some apprehensions about how it would work for us because we were very used to on-premises legacy solutions. The big win for us was that we could go and try it in the cloud.

From a deployment point of view, it was really easy. Also, because it's such a powerful product, I think our biggest lesson learned in deploying it was not to deploy everything on day one, but rather to have a staged deployment where the bits of the technology that we were comfortable with, such as the more traditional storage, should be deployed first. Once that is working and you're comfortable with it, you can then go and start deploying the bits which are more custom. Specifically, object storage.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use services on Zadara for our customers in Brazil.

The most valuable features of Zadara are its visibility and simplicity to use.

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.

I have been using Zadara for approximately two years.

The technical support from Zadara is good.

The initial setup of Zadara was simple and configured. The process took us approximately one week.

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.