The cloud-enabled world of flexible pricing lets customers man the wheel with on-demand information technology resources, like data storage. How does this compare to long-term licensing agreements? Let’s just say customers like the view from the driver’s seat.

“This is a whole new world where what you pay for is flexibility,” said Noam Shendar (pictured), general manager of the hyperscale cloud business at Zadara Storage Inc.

Shendar found this out when Zadara offered a loyal customer a 12-month contract for a steep discount. The customer opted to continue paying the higher list price in order to maintain the freedom to switch at short notice.

This anecdote acts as a guiding light for Zadara, which offers several iterations of cloud, on-premises, solid state drive and high-capacity magnetic drive storage types. The variety is necessary to please customers now accustomed to pay-as-you-go and switch-on-a-whim buying models, Shendar told Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. Shendar and Frick spoke at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. (* Disclosure below.)

Many Zadara customers choose to mix and match storage types to mirror their data. Data is not uniform, after all; some is archived and “cold”; other data is fresh and application-critical, or “hot.” A storage hybrid solution with magnetic background storage for resting data and a super-fast SSD cache in the foreground fits this reality like a glove, according to Shendar.

And customers save big by storing large data sets on magnetic drives, Shendar added. “We see extreme elasticity with regard to price,” he said.

Now you see it in AWS; now you don’t

Storage ought to be nimble in additional areas, Shendar stated. Zadara has a Fortune 10 auto customer that cannot store data anywhere network-connected to mitigate the risk of industrial espionage — so not in the public cloud by definition. Zadara provides this customer storage as a service on-prem in an air-gapped network with no internet connection.

However, the company can still run applications on Amazon Web Services Inc.’s public cloud. “We’re connected to AWS via private high-speed fiber with very, very low latency,” Shendar said. “We look like local storage, but from a data governance standpoint, it’s not at AWS,” he said.

Customers can even obtain the physical drives that Zadara stores its data on at any time. “You want to crush them with a steamroller? Go ahead,” Shendar said.

Zadara will be releasing its third-generation architecture in 2018. It will feature new, much buzzed-about storage technologies, Shendar explained without elaborating further.

Watch the complete video interview below. (* Disclosure: Zadara Storage Inc. sponsored this segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Zadara Storage nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE