Zetta has been providing NAS services via the cloud for a few years now. They built a scalable NAS architecture designed specifically for the cloud. The challenge that customers faced was how to get data to this device. In our briefing with Zetta at the ExecEvent, they solved that with Zetta Mirror.

Zetta Mirror is a software agent that runs on servers to provide a second copy of data  by replicating files to the cloud. This cloud file share is continually updated and available at all times. The Zetta cloud is a purpose-built infrastructure with a three tier architecture (access, controller and storage layers) to maintain performance as capacity grows. It's hosted in data centers in New Jersey and California allowing users to specify copies be kept at both locations if desired.

When we first talked with Zetta over a year ago, they were going after the primary storage market, providing a cloud-based alternative to the major storage infrastructure vendors. Since then, they've re-focused on the backup use case and had very positive results, seeing an increase in 10x customer adoption over their previous efforts. Their sweet spot customer is a company with between 10TB and 50TB of data to protect, many of which don't have particularly strong IT expertise. They're finding good customer segments in legal, medical, higher education and small manufacturing.

Zetta's value proposition is firmly rooted in ease of use. They install in a few minutes and users can browse their data in the cloud as easily as a local file system. There's no backup process, per se, and no backup infrastructure involved. It's the simplest of data protection models, copying files to a safe, secondary location, something that users are comfortable with.

Zetta also has full snapshot capabilities keeping snapshots for 30 days as a default, but will extend that retentions period if desired. They have agents for Linux, Windows and Solaris, with Mac coming soon.

Storage Swiss Take

Instead of taking on the entire primary storage market, Zetta has focused on the data protection use case, a segment of the cloud storage market which is much better established, but still in desperate need of uncomplicated, cost-effective solutions. At the end of the day, every company does some kind of backup and most are less than 100% satisfied with it. One big advantage Zetta has is simplicity, it’s essentially automated file replication to a NAS in the cloud. Users don’t have to run a “restore” operation using dedicated backup software to get data back.

In fact, they can also use the Zetta cloud as an off-site archive, saving monthly or yearly copies for as long as needed. Interestingly enough, a lot of companies have been using their backups as an archive for years, saving old backup copies and leaving them on tape or deduplicated disk. For them, this could be another reason to replace their current backup infrastructure with Zetta.