One of the most valuable features is its integration with other cloud solutions. We have a presence within Amazon EC2 and we leverage compute instances in there. Being able to integrate with compute, both locally within Zadara, as well as with other cloud vendors such as Amazon, is very helpful, while also being able to maintain extremely low latency between those connections. We have leveraged 10-Gig direct connections between them to be able to hook up the storage element within Zadara with the cloud platforms such as Amazon EC2. That is one of the primary technical driving factors. The other large one is the partnership and the managed service offering from Zadara. That means they have a vested interest and are able to understand any issues or problems that we have. They are there to help identify and work through them and come to solutions for us. We have a unique workload, so problems that we may have to identify and work through could be unique to us. Other customers that are just looking to manage a smaller amount of data would not ever identify or have to work through the kinds of things we do. Having a partner that is interested in helping to work through those issues, and make recommendations based on their expertise, is very valuable to us. Zadara's dedicated cores and memory provide us with a single-tenant experience. We are multi-tenant in that we manage multiple organizations and customers within our environment. We send all of that data to that single-tenant management aspect within Zadara. We have a couple of different virtual, private storage arrays, a couple of them in high-availability. The I/O engine type we're leveraging is the 2400s. We also have disaster recovery set up on the other side of the U.S. for replication and remote mirroring. Being able to manage that within the platform allows us to add additional storage ourselves, to change the configuration of the VPSA to scale up or scale down, and to make any changes to meet budgetary needs. It truly allows us to manage things from a performance standpoint as well. We can also rely upon Zadara, as a managed-services provider, to manage those requests on our behalf. In the event that we needed to submit a ticket and say, "Hey, can you add additional storage or volumes?" it's very helpful to have them leverage their time and expertise to perform that on our behalf. It is also very important that Zadara provides drive options such as SSD, NL-SAS, and SSD cache, for our workload in particular. We require our data to not only be accessible, but to be fast. Typically, most stored data that is hotter or more active is pushed onto faster storage, something like flash cache. The flash cache we began with during our first year with Zadara worked pretty well initially. But our workload being a little unique, after that, the volume of data exceeded the kind of logic that can be used in that type of cache. It just looks at what data is most frequently accessed. Usually the "first in" is on that hot flash cache, and our workload was a little bit more random than that, so we weren't getting as much of the benefit from that flash cache. The fact that Zadara provides us with the ability to actually add a hybrid of both SSDs and SATA allows us to specifically designate what volumes and what data should be on those faster drives, while still taking into account budget constraints. That way, we can manage that hybrid and reduce the performance on some of the drives that are housing data that is really being stored long-term and not accessed. Having that hybrid capability has tremendously helped with the flexibility to manage our needs from a performance standpoint as well as a cost perspective. As far as I know, they also have solid support for the major cloud vendors out there, in addition to some others that I hadn't heard of. But they certainly support Amazon EC2 and Google and Rackspace, among others. Those integrations are very important. Most organizations have some sort of a cloud presence today, whether they're hosting certain servers or compute instances or some other workload out in the cloud. Being able to integrate with the cloud and obtain data and store data, especially with all these next-generation threats and things like ransomware out there, is important. Having backups and storage locations that you can push data to, offsite, or integrate with, is definitely key.
