Virtualisation Field Day 6 – Quick Preview ZeroStack

I have been invited to a number of Virtualisation Field Day (sorry have to spell it the correct way) by Stephen Foskett, but for one reason or another things didn’t work out at my end.  The stars have aligned and I’m pleased to say I will be attending VFD 6.

All of the companies that are presenting are new to me, which makes things a lot more interesting, as a tech we like shiny new things!  The last one is ZeroStack.

What Do They Do?

According to the strap line on the website it’s ‘Zero Ops. Complete Stack. Your Cloud’.

ZeroStack provides an on-premises hyperconverged system running KVM using OpenStack as a management layer. The hyperconverged system comes as a 2U node consisting of four servers providing 32 cores, 128GB of RAM, 4TB SATA and 1.6TB SSD drives  The on-premises system then extends into cloud by utilising the ZeroStack Cloud Portal.  To be honest I’m not sure what this means, does it allow you to provision and automate VM’s in Azure, vCloud Air and AWS or just to see them as consumers of resources via a single portal?

Whatever it means, ZeroStack has some extremley smart people working for them, including Ajay Gultai, previously of VMware, where he lead the design of DRS, Storgae DRS and Storage I/O Control.

ZeroStack is an early startup, emerging from stealth at the end of August 2015.  They have started some initial sales directly customers and are beginning to engage with the channel.

Personally, I’m interested in what sets ZeroStack apart from other hyperconverged providers such as Nutanix and SimpliVity.   Tune into Virtualisation Field Day 6 to find out more!