Zetta, an enterprise-level cloud storage service available to managed service providers and VARs, finally leaves a long closed beta phase and becomes available to the channel at large today. Sure, online storage is an increasingly crowded market, but Zetta claims to have licked a few challenges that plague their peers. Here's how.
What sets Zetta apart? We haven't tested the system, but the company claims its service integrates into existing networks better than their competitors by using existing protocols. Zetta also claims to offer better security and stability to boot. One of the bullet points they're most proud of is their network snapshot/replication feature, a common feature for on-site storage solutions that's apparently rare in the cloud.
"We give them everything a current NAS system would give them," says Zetta CEO and Co-founder Jeff Treuhaft, a veteran of VeriSign, NetScape and Silicon Graphics.
Zetta's backups cost $0.25/GB a month for one terabyte, and you can increase your storage on the fly as you need it. They have no tiered service — all of their customers get all of their features, including customer service, future protocol and API support, and free performance upgrades as they become available.
Interestingly, Treuhaft says small businesses often have more sophisticated storage needs than larger enterprises — so Zetta caters to everyone, regardless of company size. The only thing their clients have in common, he says, is that they tend to come looking for storage when they hit the 20 terabyte mark, and small businesses especially can benefit from making sure backups are someone else's (namely Zetta's) problem and saving on IT staff.
Crowded Market
Still, Zetta is entering a crowded market. More than 80 percent of the MSPs filling out our current MSPmentor 100 survey already offer some sort of managed storage. (Though that figure could change, since the survey is open until December 11, 2009).
And competition looms around every corner. A sampling of moves:
- Ingram Micro Seismic recently launched an IROD (Instant Recovery on Demand) service with CA, and CA is planning SaaS moves involving ARCserve and XOsoft.
- Intronis has been building a pure channel white label SaaS storage service for MSPs and VARs.
- Level Platforms today announced integration with VaultLogix.
- Vembu recently announced plans to link into the Amazon Simple Storage Service.
- And Nimsoft announced a single dashboard for monitoring on-premise and cloud services, including Amazon S3.
Frankly, SaaS storage options facing MSPs can be overwhelming. But many MSPs are at an inflection point. Earlier today, MSPmentor noted that masterIT — an MSPmentor 100 company — was evaluating its next backup and recovery move.
Looking ahead, Zetta hopes to inject itself into those types of discussions.
Follow MSPmentor via RSS; Facebook; Identi.ca; and Twitter. And sign up for our Enewsletter; Webcasts and Resource Center. Plus, check out more MSP voices at www.MSPtweet.com.
MSPmentor / Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:44:59 GMT
Sent from FeedDemon
