Zadara Federated Edge: New Public Edge Cloud Lets MSPs Take Their Services Anywhere

‘We have been working with MSPs on Storage as a Service and Compute as a Service. This is the next step. Our MSPs now have 300 cloud platforms around the world. We asked them about a model that would bring them together. The result is the Federated Edge, which becomes the world’s largest public edge cloud,’ says CEO Nelson Nahum.

Zadara’s new Federated Edge is aimed at helping MSPs build and participate in a global cloud in which they can work with each other to provide services to customers.

The Federated Edge takes advantage of a cloud-based storage and compute infrastructure Zadara has built with its MSP partners under which MSPs host Zadara technology that is consumed based on usage, with no capital expenditure needed by the MSPs or their customers, said Nelson Nahum, CEO of the Irvine, Calif.-based cloud edge storage and service technology developer.

“We have been working with MSPs on Storage as a Service and Compute as a Service,” Nahum told CRN. “This is the next step. Our MSPs now have 300 cloud platforms around the world. We asked them about a model that would bring them together. The result is the Federated Edge, which becomes the world’s largest public edge cloud.”

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MSPs who are Zadara partners pay nothing to join the Federated Edge as the Zadara equipment already hosted by them is owned by the vendor, Nahum said.

“It’s Zadara compute, storage and networking, with cost based on use,” he said. “When we install the cloud platform at the MSP site, they can use it. Spare capacity is sent to the edge cloud. MSPs get paid for the extra capacity they send. This is an incentive for them to join the [Federated Edge].”

Because Zadara owns the equipment, the capabilities at each site are consistent, with the same hardware and software, Nahum said. “We want to make sure the SLAs are all the same.”

As a public cloud, the Federated Edge is compliant with SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA, and other similar regulations, Nahum said. “And we are in 10 times the places Amazon is,” he said.

MSPs joining the Zadara Federated Edge get three benefits, Nahum said.

The first is that MSPs are now able to take their services anywhere, he said. “Every MSP is local but can now work with customers globally, using the same tools to provision customers anywhere,” he said.

The second is that MSPs may gain customers via Zadara or from other MSPs they have never talked with or met before.

The third is the ability to upgrade their services to take advantage of the fast-growing edge-focused business, Nahum said.

“MSPs can now focus on edge workloads where latency and compliance are very important, particularly with many of the applications of the future, like IoT or self-driving cars,” he said. “We’re talking with health-care providers, for example, where medical scans mean a lot of data to move.”

The Zadara Federated Edge has already helped one customer looking to save money when trying to merge the IT operations of another company it recently acquired, said Jeremy Fitzpatrick, vice president of sales and marketing at Nfinit, a San Diego-based solution provider and data services provider that has worked with Zadara for about a year.

That customer was planning to provision its applications into Nfinit’s VMware Cloud-verified Phoenix-based data center, but then GDPR became an issue, Fitzpatrick told CRN.

“The client looked at Azure and AWS, but then also talked with Zadara, which offered the right storage infrastructure with compute on top,” he said. “Zadara had a storage cluster in Germany. We added the compute and met the customer’s requirements for a cost that was 30 percent lower than AWS.”

Anyone in the Zadara network can work with other MSPs’ locations, Fitzpatrick said.

“And for my customer with the German application, we just paid the operator there in Germany a share of the profits,” he said. “It’s a pretty unique model.”

Fitzpatrick said his company is discussing a deal with a customer with cloud operations in 40 different markets, something that AWS and Azure would have difficulty handling, he said.

“The customer needs to deploy localized operations while meeting KPIs [key performance indicators],” he said. “This is a big project, and will take time to do. But with Zadara, markets where we don’t have a data center presence we can provide a cloud-like offering.”