Zola has two parallel origins. In Zulu (and other Bantu languages of South Africa), zola means "quiet" or "tranquil" — and the name has long been used by Xhosa, Zulu, and other Southern African families. In Italian, Zola is a surname (most famously Émile Zola, the French novelist of Italian descent).
Zola is rising in the U.S.
Zola does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.
In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Zola reduce to 9, The Giver. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.