Zadara Storage the provider of enterprise storage-as-a-service (STaaS) announced that its customer Gilt, an innovative online shopping destination that pioneered the flash-sales eCommerce sector, has used Zadara Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA) to achieve the agility it was lacking from its legacy enterprise storage solution. By deploying Zadara Storage as a Service (STaaS) at Amazon Web Services (AWS), instead of an on-premise HP 3PAR storage array, Gilt reduced its storage costs by 85%, accelerated new capacity deployment from days to minutes, and freed staff from mundane storage management. It also showcased a novel use of solid state drives (SSDs) to accelerate cost-effective SATA drives, an architecture that elevates performance while dramatically lowering storage costs – essentially harnessing the speed of SSDs without incurring the costs typically associated with them.

“Our fundamental problem was aligning our IT infrastructure with our company growth. With Zadara Storage, we moved from a storage solution that was hindering growth – to one that is enabling growth,” said Anders Holm, senior systems engineer at Gilt. Zadara made the announcement timed with the Flash Memory Summit opening in Santa Clara today, where its CEO Nelson Nahum is a featured speaker.

An online shopping destination for the savvy consumer, Gilt releases new products from the most coveted brands and products to its website on a daily basis with flash discounts of up to 70% off retail. Storing the growing number of product images was creating scalability and management issues for the company, and its storage costs were outpacing that of other IT resources. When Gilt made the decision to move its compute infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS), it wanted the same levels of “as-a-service” solution for its storage but without compromising on the enterprise features that its prior NAS storage solution was delivering.

Gilt replaced its HP 3PAR storage array with Zadara’s VPSA Cloud NAS solution connected to the AWS cloud. Zadara’s on-demand SAN and NAS enabled the scalability and agility to support Gilt’s rapid growth. VPSA features such as 100TB volumes enabled ease of data management in the cloud alongside rich, enterprise data management features to ensure high availability and high performance. In addition to the 85% storage cost reduction, Gilt now could expand storage in minutes using Zadara VPSA web console and Rest APIs. As a result, Gilt’s IT team redeployed staff from mundane storage management to strategic, higher value activities.

“We are able to have significantly more capacity with Zadara, at a fraction of the cost we were paying for HP 3PAR,” Anders Holm continued. “What’s more, our ability to be responsive to our internal customers, rather than being perceived as a roadblock, was a huge win for us. Really no other solution on the market was able to meet our needs like this. The Zadara VPSA clearly was the best solution for us,” Holm said.

Gilt was also pleased with the seamless connectivity between its AWS compute resources and its Zadara storage capacity. It is able to connect any of its AWS accounts, regardless of region, to any of its Zadara Storage VPSAs. This enables powerful data availability options, and Gilt is presently considering replicating data between key locations and leveraging other Zadara data protection features, such as Zadara’s Backup to S3 (B2S3) option which allows users to replicate their data to cost-effective Amazon S3 object-based targets.

“Gilt is a perfect example of a company that recognized the critical scalability flaw behind traditional model of acquiring and managing IT resources,” said Nelson Nahum, CEO of Zadara Storage. “Why hassle with provisioning, growing and managing storage, when you can pay for only the storage you need and use, and let others manage the infrastructure like the utility service that it is — whether storage is provided in a cloud-based option, or even on the organization’s own premises. That’s the direction of the enterprise IT industry and we’re proud to work in partnership with Gilt in making it a reality.”

Nelson Nahum joins a panel of industry experts to discuss enterprise storage solutions on Wednesday, August 12 at 8:30 am PDT and again at 3:10pm PDT at the Flash Memory Summit.