Thursday, October 15, 2009

Their goal is to succeed where the late 90's storage service providers failed. Zetta did this by taking control of the whole process. Instead of trying to put a new model of acquiring storage on an old platform, Zetta decided they needed a new environment for a new model. This includes writing a distributed file system from scratch, they have chosen not to use a public domain offering, that could use industry standard, commodity hardware.

The key use case for Zetta is as a primary fileserver or for online archive. This is a cloud case where the cloud is primary storage. The focus is in the major metropolitan areas where they can provide high speed access, dedicated or leased bandwidth to that storage. The pricing is compelling and the model makes sense. Are the planets in alignment for a cloud storage as a primary storage area?

George Crump, Senior Analyst