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Cal Poly Replaces NetApp with Zadara Storage On-Premise as a Service (OPaaS) Private Cloud
[August 31, 2015]

Cal Poly Replaces NetApp with Zadara Storage On-Premise as a Service (OPaaS) Private Cloud


VMworld, BOOTH #2511 - Zadara™ Storage, the provider of enterprise storage-as-a-service (STaaS), announced that its customer California Polytechnic State University, a renowned public university with a strong engineering and science focus, made Zadara's innovative On Premise as a Service (OPaaS) private cloud storage solution the centerpiece of its move from a cost center to an IT-service provider model in serving its colleges and departments. By replacing its NetApp storage array with the Zadara Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA) located on its premises and behind its firewall, Cal Poly solved numerous management, scalability and performance issues - and gained a primary storage solution that keeps the storage within its data center, while still enjoying all the benefits of cloud pricing. By changing the way it thinks about storage, Cal Poly also eliminated the 3- to 5-year purchase-manage-refresh cycles of traditional storage, and assured it stays within its Operating Expense (OpEx) budget quarter after quarter.

Cal Poly's single NetApp array was causing an I/O storm impacting everyone's performance, as the mixed workloads it supported caused the classic "noisy neighbor" issue. The array was complex and difficult to manage, causing delays in responding to departmental requests for storage capacity. With the NetApp array's expiring warranties and functional limitations - on top of very limited OpEx budgets - Cal Poly's IT services group knew it needed to make some serious changes, but wasn't sure they had any options. After evaluating over 20 storage vendors including EMC (News - Alert), Dell, and Amazon S3, Cal Poly's IT services group chose Zadara Storage as it faced a 5-year budget lock that kept it from purchasing capital expenditure (CapEx) infrastructure.

"Storage-as-a-service has enabled us to create an infrastructure that is evergreen and will not need to be ripped and replaced in a few years. Zadara helped us rethink how we can deploy storage and offer self-service deployment options to epartments within the university," said Tim Schmidt, engineering services manager at Cal Poly. "The Zadara VPSA gives us the scalability and elasticity we need to scale up, and also to scale down - as the campuses do during semester breaks. We enjoy the economic benefits of a multi-tenant array, but maintain the performance isolation as if every department had its own storage. Zadara fit around our IT requirements, not the other way around."



"The benefits of software-defined data centers have been proven in corporations of every size. The fundamental tenets of elastic resources that adapt to your needs and the ability to pay only for the resources used, translate into material savings and departmental agility. Zadara is helping enterprises and academic institutions such as Cal Poly deploy storage as a service and enjoy these benefits," said Nelson Nahum, CEO of Zadara Storage. "Traditional storage arrays have fixed limitations that waste both human and capital resources. We are delighted to help Cal Poly's IT team serve its internal customers with an infrastructure that's as innovative as the work its scientists and professors create."

Zadara Storage is showcasing its VPSA at VMworld 2015, San Francisco this week in booth #2511. Additional Resources: Case Study (bit.ly/ZadaraCalPoly), Video Testimonial (vimeo.com/137383859)


Click to Tweet: Cal Poly Replaces NetApp with @ZadaraStorage On-Premise as a Service (OPaaS) #PrivateCloud - http://bit.ly/CalPolyPR

About Zadara Storage

Zadara Storage offers enterprise storage-as-a-service, delivering high-performance, highly available file and block storage. The company's patented, software-defined Virtual Private Storage Arrays™ (VPSA™) deliver flexible, multi-tenant enterprise SAN and NAS technology for peta-scale primary and secondary storage. With isolated resources, exceptional data security, and management control, VPSAs meet the most stringent Service-Level Agreements (SLAs). Zadara is available both via OPaaS (On-Premise as a Service) and through a wide range of worldwide cloud and colocation providers, including value-added relationships with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Dimension Data (News - Alert), TelecityGroup, CloudSigma, and others. Visit www.zadarastorage.com, the Zadara Blog, or on LinkedIn and Twitter.


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