Many of the VMware, Inc. customers present at this year’s conference are using a fairly new offering in enterprise storage: Storage-as-a-Service. VMware itself has been attempting to get its own version of this type of service off the ground, but for now it is being handled through third-party providers, such as Zadara Storage, Inc.

Nelson Nahum, cofounder and CEO of Zadara, sat down with John Furrier (@furrier) and John Troyer (@jtroyer), host and guest host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during VMworld in Las Vegas, to discuss the company’s Storage-as-a-Service business model and why it is relevant in today’s enterprise market.

The Storage-as-a-Service model

Zadara is a true pay-as-you-go enterprise storage service provider. The company offers a choice of public cloud through either Amazon or Azure, or private cloud where they ship the customer all the necessary equipment at no charge and manage it remotely. Once the customer is set up on Zadara’s system, they can then replicate and move data easily between public and private cloud, according to Nahum.

“When you we say enterprise storage, it’s primary and secondary storage with the same capabilities that you will find in traditional storage arrays, but because it’s coming to the cloud, this can be provisioned as a service in one minute,” explained Nahum.

The benefits of using Zadara

Many existing VMware enterprise customers are used to more traditional storage solutions, such as SAN or VSAN and direct attached storage solutions. Furthermore, these companies are used to allocating a great deal of overhead for the more traditional methods — not just in hardware, but in staffing teams to manage it.

With Zadara’s Storage-as-a-Service model, any hardware required for private cloud is provided and the system is managed remotely, so there is no need to provide resources for either. Customers can spend their capital and manpower focusing on more worthwhile projects, Nahum explained.

“We manage the system for the customer, even if it’s on premise,” said Nahum. “This is part of the capabilities of the advantages of using Zadara, because they can free up their time to work on more strategic things.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE