Jake Widman
Monday, 06 April 2009 23:43
Startup Zetta has gone public with its "enterprise-class, on-demand cloud storage architecture," which it claims makes cloud storage suitable for primary enterprise data.
"Zetta Enterprise Cloud Storage gives our customers the data security and availability assurances they need to more widely deploy cloud storage,” said
Zetta CEO Jeff Treuhaft in the announcement. The company claims that Zetta storage behaves just like a local server on the network, enabling companies to build out storage to meet their needs on an on-demand basis, with a minimal learning curve.
The company criticizes current cloud storage solutions as lacking data integrity guarantees and snapshot and replication features. Zetta's storage is based on its own file system but uses standard interfaces such as CIFS and NFS, and provides "enterprise-class data integrity," "guaranteed data security and privacy," and "performance assurances," according to the company. It also incorporates "new advances in RAID technologies; PKI based security; and geo-redundant data collection, storage and distribution."
Also attractive to businesses will be Zetta's "pay as you grow" pricing structure. While details have not been announced, a
TCO calculator on the Zetta website states a starting price of US$0.25 (25 cents) per gigabyte and states the cost will decline quickly with scale.
Zetta, founded in 2007 by ex-Netscape employees, has been testing its service with 20-some beta customers since January. It is now accepting public signups for a free trial; the registration form is
here .