Hey MSPs! join Zadara’s Federated Edge to fight cloud giants

Zadara has launched a global Federated Edge offering for managed service providers (MSPs), who will sell private cloud services to their customers using Zadara’s global infrastructure and so fend off the public cloud giants.

The firm supplies zStorage – on-premises or co-lo storage arrays as a service – zNetwork and zCompute – on-premises servers with VM images – based on its recent acquisition of NeoKarm. The storage, network and compute resources are used on a pay-as-you-go basis.

The idea is that MSPs don’t have to make capital expenditures to set up points-of-presence near their customers. Instead they can use Zadara’s Federated Edge program to provision IT ‘as-a-service’ private cloud offers as close as necessary to those customers’ workloads. Zadara provides all of the hardware and software on a shared revenue basis.

Nelson Nahum, Zadara’s CEO, said in a statement: “We strive to be a true partner to MSPs, not just a technology provider. We understand their unique challenges and have designed the Federated Edge Program with their specific needs in mind…[It] harnesses the collective power of MSPs, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

Zadara graphic.

All the infrastructure – servers, network and storage – is provided and available on-demand via the Zadara’s Federated Edge network. Operators pay only for usage. Zadara says Federated Edge Zones, or points of presence, available in cities across the world ease concerns around data sovereignty and compliance issues. ;

Dave McCarthy, research manager, edge strategies, for IDC, supplied a supporting statement: “With their Federated Edge, Zadara is providing a lifeline for MSPs looking to boost their points of presence and deploy anywhere in the world the same way that they deploy in their own data centres.

“Latency requirements, cost considerations, operational resiliency, and security/compliance factors all contribute to the need to deploy infrastructures closer to where data is generated and consumed – at the far edge of a networks’ reach, away from the centralised cloud.”

Dell is developing a managed storage service with Project APEX. It’s not much of a stretch to see APEX including PowerEdge servers as a service too. Pure Storage has a similar deal through Equinix.

Public cloud suppliers have started supplying on-premises kit. For example, Amazon with Outposts, and Azure with its Azure Stack which is supported by Dell EMC and Pure Storage.

Zadara is responding to this increased competition by recruiting MSPs to act as service channel partners and suggesting they can get closer to customers and offer more tailored services than the cloud titans.