The vision behind Zetta is to deliver enterprise-grade cloud storage as a service for IT professionals seeking primary storage solutions. The Zetta team represents a unique combination of petabyte-scale storage administration experience and expertise combined with world-class distributed computing technology experts.

To achieve its aim, the Zetta team has built a service that combines the best aspects of today's top-tier, on-premise NAS solutions with the advantages and efficiencies of the on-demand, cloud delivery model.

The Zetta founding team comprises four individuals who all have a deep background in operating storage infrastructures, and an even deeper background in leveraging distributed computing principles to solve business problems in new ways: CEO Jeff Treuhaft (pictured), CTO Jeff Whitehead, Head of Engineering Lou Montulli, and lead engineer Jason Harrison.

These founders developed the Zetta business plan after they experienced the day-to-day difficulties associated with management of large-scale commercial storage deployments. As the data under their management grew quickly into the petabytes, it became very clear to them that existing storage solutions weren't designed to support the kind of scale that data footprints were rapidly approaching, and it also became clear that purchasing, integrating and managing new failure-prone storage can be an extremely time-, resource- and labor-intensive exercise that rarely satisfied their goals.

Zetta's founders believe the company will change the way that data storage is purchased, managed and supported.

“Zetta’s core business is built around simplifying and supporting the expanding data storage needs of business customers, without asking them to sacrifice the data protection and quality of service they require,” said Laura DuBois, Program Director Storage Software, IDC. “Zetta's solution for enterprise cloud storage addresses customers' feature set expectations and could usher in an era of cloud storage as an option for primary data.”