# Introduction

This documentation presents information specific to Zadara Storage
SAN and NAS products.

## Intended Audience

This document is intended for end users and storage administrators
subscribers of Zadara Storage’s Enterprise Storage-as-a-Service product,
called VPSA Storage Array and VPSA Flash Array,
in both public and private clouds.

## Overview

Zadara Storage Cloud was architected from the ground up to build the first
“Enterprise-Storage-as-a-Service Data Storage System for the Cloud” with
the following key targets:

- Enterprise quality, resilient, highly available, consistent performance storage for
  the most demanding data center application workloads
- Consumed as a Service - flexible, dynamic and billable
- Scale out - grow to hundreds of Storage Nodes,
  thousands of drives and multi-Petabyte Storage
- True Multi-tenancy - End-user controlled privacy and security. Separate workloads,
  resource allocation, and management per tenant, such that each tenant truly experiences
  “no noisy neighbors” secure storage.
- Universal Storage - Supports all data services on one common infrusructure: Block, File, Object

Starting with release 18.07 Zadara provides the following offerings:

* VPSA Storage Array - a hybrid virtual array that supports both HDD and SSD drives
* VPSA Flash Array - an array optimized for efficient utilization of flash media

Most of the content in this guide is for both the
VPSA Storage Array and VPSA Flash Array.
Sections and features that are specific to one offering only are marked
accordingly.

Both VPSA Storage Array and VPSA Flash Array
provide:

- Unified storage with both Block volumes and File shares exposure
- Data Protection (RAID-1, 10)
- Advanced Data management (Thin Volumes, Snapshots & Clones, Remote Mirroring,
  Built-in Backup to Object Storage, Built-in Anti-Virus service, SSD Flash Cache, etc…)
- Security features such as Dual factor authentication, Role-based access control,
  Data-at-Rest encryption and Data-in-Flight encryption
- Ability to run IO intensive applications as a Docker compatible container
  within the storage controller
- Management GUI and Rest API
- Flexibility to grow and shrink resources such as CPU, RAM, cache and drive allocations.

All of which is reliable, secured, private and consumed as a service.

VPSA Flash Array In addition Zadara VPSA Flash Array  provides:

- Data reduction mechanism based on inline deduplication and compression to save on capacity of
  relatively expensive SSD media
- Tiered storage pools (SSD/HDD or SSD/S3 or azure API compatible object storage) with automatic data movement according to IO pattern.

## VPSA Components

### Zadara Provisioning Portal

The Zadara Provisioning Portal is your gateway to the Zadara Storage
ecosystem through which you can create, view and modify your VPSA
configurations (engines, drives, Cache, etc…) on multiple Clouds that Zadara Storage offers.

### Virtual Controller

A Virtual Controller (VC) is a Virtual Machine with dedicated CPUs &
RAM which runs the VPSA IO stack and control stack. Two VCs are paired
in an Active-Standby pair for high availability. The VC maintains a
sophisticated and granular block-level mapping layer from virtual to
physical address spaces, thus enabling enterprise-level data management
capabilities like Thin Provisioning, Snapshots, Cloning and Remote
Mirroring.

The VCs provide GUI and REST API end points for management and control.

### Dedicated Drives

The Zadara Storage Cloud Orchestrator assigns dedicated drives for each
VPSA. The drives are provisioned from different Storage Nodes (SN) for
maximum redundancy and performance. Each drive is exposed as a separate
iSCSI target from the SN and is LUN masked only to the VPSA’s VCs. Your
QoS is guaranteed because neighbors, with provisioned drives adjacent
to yours, cannot access your drives, impact your performance or
compromise your privacy and security.