Mahesh Neelakanta is Director of Technical Services at Florida Atlantic University, responsible for managing IT for FAU’s computer sciences department. Last year, he wanted to build a private cloud facility to support student projects. The students already had virtual desktops from VMware (VMW) and a number of Windows applications running on Windows servers. But they needed more compute power, and Neelakanta felt a cloud infrastructure would support their needs efficiently, as well as give them experience of working with cloud technology.
The obvious choice for the cloud software stack was VMware, but the VMware solution was beyond Neelakanta’s budget. He looked at OpenStack, the open source cloud system that has received plentiful publicity in the last few years. But after reading up on OpenStack, he was put off by the amount of work that would have been required to set it up and get it running. “It’s a great platform, but it requires a lot of management,” Neelakanta told the Daily Cloud. “It would have taken us weeks to get it working and it was not guaranteed that we would be successful.”
Then he heard of a solution from a new startup, ZeroStack. ZeroStack has developed a hyperconverged cloud solution, essentially a single box including compute, storage, networking, and OpenStack-based software that enables a user to quickly configure and turn up a private cloud solution. The solution was in what Neelakanta describes as “late alpha/early beta” stage, but he installed it at FAU, where students are using it today. “It’s worked out really well,” he says. “I provisioned the resources, and the students can build virtual machines on top. They are building sandboxes with 20 to 30 VMs. The professors use it for database research. We now have a self-service cloud that requires very little human intervention.”
“Basically, we’ve built a private cloud in a box,” says ZeroStack co-founder and CEO Ajay Gulati. Based in Mountain View in Silicon Valley, ZeroStack took a fresh approach to the problems that have hampered enterprise adoption of OpenStack. They have built a preconfigured solution that includes all the components necessary to create a private cloud. Where OpenStack lacked important features, or where those features were difficult for customers to work with, ZeroStack added their own proprietary software, such as a self-healing “cluster” that enables the system to recover from failure of a single component by moving the workload to other components.
Gulati spent six years at VMware before leaving in 2013. He teamed up with Kirin Bondalapati, the other co-founder, who worked on virtualization technology at software startup Bromium and before that at chipmaker AMD. The company is backed by Silicon Valley venture funds Formation 8 and Foundation Capital. Their advisors include a co-founder of Nimble Storage and a co-founder of Insieme Networks (the Cisco spin-in that developed the technology at the core of Cisco’s software-defined networking solution).
Today, the ZeroStack system is in beta testing with about 15 customers including enterprises in retail, manufacturing and the pharmaceutical industries. ZeroStack Director of Marketing Nick Suh tells us the betas are going well and they expect many of them to convert to paying customers once the product goes on general release later in Q1. According to Suh, one beta tester is comparing ZeroStack to a “pure” OpenStack infrastructure the customer built himself. Because of all the work involved in standing up their “pure” OpenStack solution, they nicknamed it “The Beast.”
“They did a bake-off, and on initial deployment we were superior to the Beast hands-down, which they were expecting, but what they were not expecting was that we came out superior on performance too,” says Suh.
The ZeroStack team is growing, and busy signing up channel partners to sell the product once it’s on general availability. The notion of hyperconverged solutions—all the hardware and software you need in a single box—has already won popularity with Nutanix, a startup with a storage-focused hyperconverged solution. Nutanix reported revenue of $241 million in fiscal 2015 and has filed to go public. Says Suh: “We’re meeting a need in the marketplace. Channel partners tell us there is lots of pent-up demand among their installed base. We anticipate a high level of interest.”
There is rapidly growing interest in private cloud solutions among enterprises, as more embrace the goal of a hybrid cloud solution, which should enable them to take advantage of the public cloud without getting locked into any one public cloud provider. According to Gulati, VMware and Microsoft private cloud solutions still lack some of the key elements that would make them compelling, easy-to-deploy, easy-to-use choices for an enterprise that doesn’t have a large team of engineers to assign to the challenge. OpenStack, despite its missed cues, is now improving rapidly. “OpenStack is getting better with every release, in terms of scalability and functionality. Even since we started (two years ago), we’ve seen lots of improvements.”
Gulati does not see the open source version of OpenStack as a competitive threat. On the contrary, he says, growing acceptance of OpenStack should help drive demand for ZeroStack. The closest competitor to ZeroStack is probably Platform 9, covered by the Daily Cloud here. The Platform 9 solution provides more options, in particular on the customer’s choice of virtualization. But fewer options makes the ZeroStack solution simpler. And for most enterprises trying to get their head around the myriad software layers involved in a cloud, simplicity is a valuable asset. ZeroStack and Platform 9 share the approach of building proprietary software to supplement OpenStack where the open source solution is not strong enough. That raises the question of how much success hardware companies, like Cisco and HP Enterprise, will have with their “pure” open source OpenStack solutions. Gulati sees all flavors of OpenStack doing well in the next few years.
“The rising tide of OpenStack will lift all boats.”
