Zstor

As the ideas and innovation around IT networking evolve— especially in the enterprise-sphere—the line between storage and interconnected network components continues to blur. Today, software that defines and directs networks often resides atop cloud and data center infrastructures in a way similar to how firmware resides on a singular network device. It is evident that as network environments continue to evolve, the value proposition of storage continues to broaden across progressive multi-dimensional network environments. With ample expertise in both storage-related software-defined technology as well as networking, Switzerland-based Zstor is a company that helps its clients attain smart and synergistically networked cloud and data center environments. The legacy approach in data centers to divide server, storage, and networking administration is changing into a software-defined infrastructure administration built on more or less commodity hardware for hyperconverged servers, storage, and switches. Zstor is leveraging its expertise on the software and integration side to supply turnkey solutions and speed up the go-to-market process for its customers. “By partnering with bleeding-edge technology partners like Mellanox and Cumulus Networks, we integrate their technology-edge in our solutions to make our customers more competitive in their respective markets,” says Helmut Kopel, CEO at Zstor.

Mellanox is one of the first companies to merge the notion of high-speed networking into distributed storage. Today, their range of offerings has proven to be key drivers in software-defined storage solutions. Cumulus Networks, on the other hand, is known for introducing the industry’s first, full-featured Linux operating system for networking hardware. Cumulus’ Linux-based scale-out approach for the entire networking stack follows the same design principles as server and storage architectures and focuses on scale-out, simplicity, and automation readiness.

Zstor’s system integration experience in working with cloud and hosting providers across Europe gives our customers the reliability and trust to realize projects accurately and in time

The consumption model of an integrated stack can easily be driven through the hyperconverged solutions with open networking to help customers deploy web-scale architectures. Meanwhile, Zstor’s new partner, Excelero with its NVMesh software, proves to be an innovative player to bring high-speed Ethernet software-defined storage and networking toward a software-defined infrastructure. “Mellanox’ Bluefield together with Excelero’s NVMesh software for 200Gb/s high-performance Ethernet storage fabrics will bring NVMe over Fabrics IOPS, ultra-low latency, impressive performance, and cost-advantage for NVMe storage solutions,” adds Kopel.

In a nutshell, Zstor has established itself as the go-to entity for several prominent cloud and hosting providers across Europe. The company’s solution stack and their easy delivery approach, are in many ways unique in the market and are field-proven in production environments. Through project experience and customer feedback, the company can fine-tune solutions of their partners’ technologies to ultimately render them with customized feature sets. The success story of one such client best exemplifies Zstor’s zeal in delivering all-round SDN solutions. For a Swiss cloud provider, the company helped to plan, integrate, and roll out the 100Gbs Ethernet network infrastructure with more than 150 switches and 1,000 network adapters for five data centers, all with automated roll-out capabilities using SDN through Cumulus and Mellanox. “Zstor’s system integration experience in working with cloud and hosting providers across Europe gives our customers the reliability and trust to realize projects accurately and in time,” adds Kopel. To broaden the spectrum of their offerings further, Zstor has also cultivated partnership-expertise in delivering software-defined cloud solutions. The company adopts an education-cum-training-based consultative approach to identify their clients’ requirements and deliver solutions accordingly, such that, in the long run, the clients will be self-sufficient in running Zstor’s technology stack with minimal assistance.