Noam Shendar, Vice President of Business Development for Zadara Storage, visited theCube during the Amazon Webservices Summit this week, sitting down with hosts Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick to discuss Zadara’s services, and their positioning with Amazon.

Shendar took the opportunity to define Zadara Storage as a storage-array-as-a-service company. “At Amazon, we’re positioned as the premium alternative to Amazon’s native storage services,” Shendar explained, “When you need something that’s bigger, faster, better—that’s when you turn to us.”

Compared to other options available to you with Amazon, Shendar stated that Zadara has the edge. For example, there’s Amazon Simple Storage Services (S3), which is object storage. “Object is great for some things, but it’s not good for databases, and it’s not good for files shares, because, with object storage, you can only upload or download files.” Dave Vellante pointed out that S3 is ideal for archiving however, where file modification would be minimal.

Another option would be Amazon Elastic Block Store. “Amazon recognized the need for block storage,” Zadara acknowledged, “You need that for databases and analytics, but it’s quite limited in terms of performance.” Even with the launch of Provisioned IOPS for EBS, performance is still limited. “It’ll top out at 2000 IOPS per volume and, just like standard EBS, it won’t attach to more than one server at a time.” Zadara breaks that 2000 IOPS barrier, and supports multiple server attachments.

Dave Vellante asked about Zadara’s work with Amazon, to which Shendar replied positively. “Amazon has no defensiveness about what we do versus what they do,” he stated about the partnership, “When it makes sense, they send customers to us, and it’s good for both of us. They get to preserve those customers, and we get business out of it. It’s been a joy to work with an open-minded company.”