Zadara buys NeoKarm, jumps full stack into the private cloud

Zadara, the enterprise storage as a service vendor, has gone full-stack by acquiring a compute-as-a-service startup called NeoKarm.

Zadara first teamed up with NeoKarm, a one year-old Tel-Aviv based company, in October, in order to provide a turnkey compute-as-a-service for managed service providers (MSPs) and enterprises. MSPs could equip their data centres with servers without any CAPEX spending. Customers could get on-demand compute and storage services in an existing on-premises data centre, in a private colocation facility, or in a Zadara cloud location.

Now Zadara finds it likes the NeoKarm technology so much that it is buying the company. The price has not been revealed but is being paid with Zadara cash. NeoKarm CEO Simon Grinberg, and some DevOps and engineering colleagues will join Zadara to continue the development of the technology and drive new compute-focused initiatives.

Nelson Nahum

Nelson Nahum, Zadara’s CEO, said in a statement: “The NeoKarm technology seamlessly integrates with our storage solution and offers a vastly improved performance for our customers and partners. I am thrilled to welcome the NeoKarm team to Zadara.”

Simon Grinberg

Simon Grinberg said the companies share a “vision of offering a competitive on-demand cloud for service providers. I am excited to join the team at Zadara to continue developing our seamless on-demand private cloud for providers, available at existing data centers, collocations or other cloud locations, built and fully-managed by Zadara.”

Added NeoKarm

Zadara graphic.

The Zadara cloud services platform with added NeoKarm provides automated end-to-end infrastructure provisioning of compute, storage and networking resources. The service features AWS-compatible APIs, which enables customers to deploy applications via the same scripts they use to deploy in AWS.

MSP and enterprise users can self-provision multiple VMs. Zadara says its cloud service platform is good for edge locations, perhaps anticipating continual public cloud erosion of core on-premises data centre use.

As of today Zadara has more than 300 MSP customers for its storage and compute-as-a-service offerings. The company said it has deployed more than 20 private compute clouds using the NeoKarm software.

Chasing clouds

NeoKarm was formed from the ashes of Stratoscale, a Tel Aviv-based company that crashed in December 2019. Stratoscale had developed private cloud hyperconverged system software. This turned an HCI system into an AWS-compatible region capable of running supporting EC2, S3, EBS, and RDS instances, and supporting Kubernetes. 

Stratoscale’s software IP assets were obtained by newly-founded NeoKarm, in February 2020. NeoKarm’s founder and CEO was Simon Grinberg, the ex-VP for Product and Cloud Architecture at Stratoscale.