Zadara Storage gives your public cloud storage a little privacy

Zadara Storage wants to bring the security, control, and performance of the private cloud to public cloud storage. The move is a good one, as a growing number of companies are realizing public cloud storage is not a one-size-fits-all solution.

The company first caught our eye when it won the Innovation Showdown at our CloudBeat conference in December. When Zadara showed the above picture of companies sharing a dirty swimming pool together, we realized how obvious the problem was and how effective this solution could be, if pulled off correctly.

Basically, if tons of companies are using the same public cloud solution, other companies’ data will be brushing up against yours in the same virtual space. The construct is just too rigid and doesn’t offer enterprise-grade flexibility. If you want the granular control and security of a private data center but inexpensive public cloud pricing, Zadara wants to help with its Virtual Private Storage Array offering. VPSAs are connected to your own cloud servers and let you choose between SSD, SAS, or SATA drives.

“The speed we provide is 10 times faster than Amazon’s block storage,” CEO and co-founder Mark Spowart told VentureBeat. “We want to give you complete management of your resources.”

Behind the scenes, Zadara is accomplishing this goal by buying or renting hardware within the data centers of Amazon, Rackspace, and other companies and then selling that storage paired with its own proprietary software. Thus far, the company is up and running with Amazon, Rackspace and OpSource. “We are the only premium storage offering in those clouds,” Spowart said.

Irvine, Calif.-based Zadara Storage is now in beta testing with 10 clients and plans to launch for general availability in mid-April. Ideally, the company would eventually like to licence its software to the big dogs, but first it has to prove the solution works and create demand. The company was founded in early 2011 and has 12 employees. It is in the process of securing its first round of funding.

You can see a well-made video outlining Zadara’s service below: