On the back end Zetta has data centers in San Jose and New Jersey that utilize a purpose built infrastructure with a three-tier architecture, (access, controllers and storage) to maintain performance as it scales. Aside from their feature set, Treuhaft said this performance is the reason other cloud storage solutions can’t provide the enterprise storage experience Zetta can.

Like a lot of new technology offerings, Zetta is finding its way into organizations initially as a data protection solution. This is happening for a couple of reasons: everyone needs backup so there are more potential use cases and for a lot of companies, it works better than the traditional solution they’re using.

Zetta Mirror is an agent that runs on clients locally and automatically syncs with the Zetta cloud. Users set snapshot schedules to replicate file versions as frequently as needed. For a company used to running a complex backup application to disk and/or tape, creating DR copies and paying to truck them off-site, this solution will seem too easy. File restores mean mounting the online copy through Zetta Mirror and data transfers are WAN-optimized, leveraging Zetta’s multi-threaded architecture.

Zetta is coming out of Beta and has over 50 customers and total stored data that’s growing at 6-8% per week. They’re being chosen by companies who are tired of paying for complex and expensive backup infrastructure. With a ‘copy and paste’ simplicity, Zetta replaces backup and DR solutions, and provides restores on-line. Another use case is an archive for data that must be stored off-site, usually as a second copy. After they get going with Zetta, these companies often promote this secondary copy to the primary copy and free up the local storage it was on. Many of these customers have bought the cloud storage concept but were dissatisfied with the current offerings, which Treuhaft says aren’t really storage, but just cheap capacity.