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ZeroStack is a recently out of stealth company providing a cloud managed hyper-converged appliance running OpenStack. It is targeting private cloud customers who are wanting to stand up their own OpenStack instances but don’t want the hassle of getting it all working themselves. What ZeroStack also does which is unique is combine this infrastructure part with application deployment which for me is the exciting bit.

It is early days for the company but it has seasoned financial backers, advisers and founders and after just a year has an impressive amount of functionality in its product.

Private Cloud

The use case is companies wanting to replicate the ease of public cloud but in as a private cloud. Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure make spinning up VMs or even direct application instances easy and allow you to pay per use. It’s all about lowering the admin of deployment and moving to an IT consumption model.

This is all great but companies at the moment need to replicate this functionality in-house and may like to built out a private cloud. They may need data kept on premises due to perceived security concerns or even legally requiring data to be held in a particular location. There may be more practical concerns like the amount of data to be stored/analysed that makes it impractical to move externally. The issue of cost may be an issue with scare stories of AWS bills racking up quickly although I do find companies are very poor at working out their own internal data center costs so comparisons are not necessarily accurate.

The point where deployment happens is also shifting away from infrastructure support teams to application support teams and further along to applications themselves managing their own infrastructure resources via API calls to a cloud to spin up new VMs with automated deployment and scaling of applications.

Suffice to say companies are wanting to replicate public cloud functionality internally to give applications the resources they require. Current software options are generally VMware which is feature rich with excellent infrastructure resiliency with a cost model to match the functionality or OpenStack which is open source, not as feature rich with deliberately less infrastructure resiliency but doesn’t have license costs due to a vendor.

ZeroStack uses the tagline “Public Cloud Experience, Private Cloud Control” and as I see it is attempting to give its customers four key things:

1. Hardware: Hyper-Converged Appliance

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Virtualisation Field Day 4 is happening in Austin, Texas from 14th-16th January and I’m very lucky to be invited as a delegate.

I’ve been previewing the companies attending, have a look at my introductory post: Virtualisation Field Day 4 Preview.

Scale Computing has presented previously at Storage Field Day 5, this is their 1st Virtualisation Field Day but they must be keen to get their message out as they’ve already signed up for Virtualisation Field Day 5.

Scale Computing is another member of the hyper-converged space along with Nutanix, SimpliVity and VMware’s EVO:RAIL. They have been shipping hyper-converged as long as SimpliVity but are less well known. Their management provenance is from Avamar (now EMC), Double-Take, Seagate, Veritas and Corvigo.

The writing is on the wall that converged and hyper-converged will be the only way you purchase infrastructure in the future. Why waste time rolling your own? There is therefore plenty of opportunity for a massive market. Scale Computing started life as a scale-out storage platform and then added compute.

Scale Computing has a hyper-converged appliance called HC3 running on KVM so offering an alternative to the behemoth that is VMware and Microsoft. The HC3 name comes from Hyper-Converged 3 (being 1:servers, 2:storage and 3:virtualisation). Their marketing is all about reducing cost and simplifying virtualisation complexity and is ideal for those who haven’t adopted virtualisation due to cost and complexity or are looking for a new alternative and reduced cost. They generally target SMB size workloads but this can still grow fairly large.

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