Cloud Hosting Journal on Ulitzer

Zetta, a year-and-some Silicon Valley start-up barely out of its cradle, wants the enterprise to entrust its data to Zetta's storage cloud as its primary storage solution.

The start-up went commercial Wednesday with its Enterprise Cloud Storage on-demand NAS after three rounds of private beta tests this year involving primary data, archiving and backup with a bunch of manufacturing, media, technology, education, legal and financial services concerns serving as guinea pigs.

It claims to be able to address the worries the enterprise has about the cloud and its security and privacy issues, unpredictable costs, data integrity, and of course reliability and availability.

In fact, Zetta claims its service is better than anything an enterprise "could ever afford to do on its own" at a massive scale.

It says on-premises NAS is up against high capital costs, limited capacity, poor utilization rates, high administrative costs, expensive space and power, complex hardware and software and no variable protection.

It also accuses Web 2.0 cloud storage services of being shoddy.

They lack real multi-tenancy, POSIX compliance, file system semantics, snapshots, replication, transparency, control, enterprise integration, unlimited connectivity paths as well as Zetta's other virtues, it says.

Zetta has, for instance, built its own native file system from the ground up to handle multi-tenancy and distributed computing.

Given the explosion of unstructured data and the pressures on organizations to reduce both capex and opex, IDC program manager Brad Nisbet figures Zetta's Enterprise Cloud Storage "can augment, and in some cases, even replace the function of on-premise primary storage for tier-2 unstructured data with the business advantages of an on-demand model."

Zetta argues that the burdened cost of owning and operating enterprise-class storage far exceeds the initial purchase price. Its numbers say those costs can add up to a couple of dollars per gigabyte a month to $3 or $4 per GB/month whereas its widgetry starts at 25 cents per GB/month for 1TB-10TB with discounts for long-term or additional space commitments.

Various bandwidth options are also available, including a simple 10 cent-a-gigabyte transferred or a 95th percentile metered rate of $9/Mb. There's no charge for moving a new data footprint into the Zetta Cloud.

The company calls its rates "a game changing reduction."

There's a cost comparison index at http://www.zetta.net/tcoCalculator.php.

Zetta claims its Enterprise Cloud Storage is the first service of its kind, purpose-built to be a primary storage platform for businesses with growing data storage needs.

It says that unlike rival first-generation cloud storage services with object store orientations, it's standards-based - like standard file transfer (FTP) and NFS (Network File System) - offering plug-and-play integration. A user doesn't have to reprogram its storage interfaces, and existing applications just work.

It also provides the data encryption, logical service segregation and data thumbprints familiar in enterprise data centers.

And it claims its data availability is better than enterprise-grade. It's got three-way data parity protection and multiple levels of integrity checking that it says provides four to five orders of magnitude better data protection than on-premise equipment.

That results in SLAs on service and data availability and performance that are better than, say, Amazon's S3, extending beyond simple availability to performance and a guarantee of no data loss.

The widgetry, described as a three-tier redundant 10 Gbe carrier-class network, with redundant 10 Gbe SSD servers and redundant 1 Gbe-10G Gbe switching, also involves full-featured snapshots for point-in-time data versioning and recovery from accidental changes or deletions.

Users can choose a WAN, dedicated private circuits or in-datacenter cross-connects to match bandwidth and latency requirements.

CEO Jeff Treuhaft is promising customers near-instant access and use of their existing protocols to petabytes of enterprise storage "with equal or better protection and security features than are generally available in their own data center. They can focus on unlocking the value of their data not just protecting it and can redeploy scarce capital assets to other projects."

Zetta has raised $11 million to date and is backed by Sigma Partners, Foundation Capital and its serial entrepreneur founders.

The Zetta team has prior experience building and operating multi-petabyte enterprise storage infrastructures. They have also been responsible for early commercialization of the web through distributed computing standards such as HTTP Cookies, SSL, HTTP Proxying, Server Push and Global Load Balancing.

Zetta says it's been live and operational, storing real world data since late last year.

UCLA's Computer Science Department is reportedly replacing an antiquated tape-based backup infrastructure with an active archive of its data on the Zetta cloud that is expected to hold 10TB-25TB and one of Silicon Valley's big law firms is migrating 25 terabytes of data off an old WORM archive system to its online storage infrastructure and could go to 50TB.

The school reportedly found Zetta cheaper than buying more NAS/DAS systems.

Treuhaft says his beta customers started going paid in July and he now has about 100 accounts.

The company has a live data center in California with plans for additional ones on both coasts next year followed by Texas and Chicago in 2011, a blueprint Treuhaft feels might be accelerated.