Zetta Does Not See Commoditization Of Cloud Storage


One of the big unknowns facing cloud computing is whether this business supplying computing services to companies will become commoditized.

This is especially true of cloud storage, where the differentiation among vendors is less dramatic than it is delivering computing power or application management over the Internet.

Data is either available or it isn’t, and access time can be measure quite easily.

So with new vendors entering the market, such as Microsoft (which is charging only 15 cents per gigabyte of storage), should an startup such as Zetta be concerned?

CEO Jeff Treuhaft says no. Cloud storage may get commoditized in the consumer market place, but not when it is offered to the enterprise, he says. “They are looking for something other than a raw disk,” Treuhaft explained this week during an interview at the Always On Summit.

Zetta says its infrastructure is a competitive advantage and that its 25 cents per gigabyte per month charge is attractive to customers. The company buys disks from third-party suppliers, but builds its own hardware and writes its own software for backup, or replication, management and encryption. The system makes extensive use of virtualization to spread data among machines and ensure it is available should one machine crash.

“We took the position you really have to build this as a multi-tenant service from day one,” he said. Multi-tenancy also translates into greater efficiency because it allows several customers to share the same piece of hardware.

Zettta is technically still in beta, but it says demand is healthy. “We have companies now that are not starting with one application but with three,” he said at the Stanford University gathering.

Still, with the market getting more crowded and competitors such as Amazon with its S3 service well established, commoditization over time is a danger.

Zetta doesn’t release its revenue figures and isn’t yet profitable. Monitoring these numbers over the next couple year will be an important market telltale – if the company is brave enough to report them.