Tech Field Day 13 Preview: Zerostack

There are many interesting and exciting vendors on the itinerary for Tech Field Day 13. One that really intrigues me is ZeroStack. I did a month long study trying to learn Openstack for my vBrownbag Tech talk at VMworld 2016. I love cloud technologies and their ease of consumption. There are a lot of issues associated with public cloud that Openstack addresses. You use on-premises hardware, have total control of your data, and don’t have the reoccurring costs.

On the flipside, enterprise scale Openstack would require multiple SMEs to maintain. The technology is complex from an outsider’s perspective. In my video I concluded that I love the consumption model but think it’s too complicated to maintain. Enter ZeroStack

ZeroStack aims to address an enterprise’s major sticking points with “cloud”. The DIY Openstack approach forces IT Operations to become developers to an extent and it introduces a new skill set that is complicated to learn. A public cloud strategy can have unpredictable performance due to noisy neighbors. Also, the cost of success is very high. There comes a point where an on-premises solution is more cost effective and you may need to move the workload in house.

ZeroStack takes the Openstack products and splits them into two categories. Your data, storage, management and compute reside in your datacenter, running on their hyperconverged platform, the Zblock. They also support some validated hardware from trusted vendors like Dell, HPE, Cisco UCS, and SuperMicro.

They host your user interface and daily operations tasks in the ZeroStack cloud service. They also maintain the health and can provide new features and services without your Ops team needing to deploy them.

Their solution is intriguing to me, especially splitting the infrastructure. I can’t wait to see it in action.