ZeroStack Offers a Fix for the Private Cloud

The private cloud is broken. It’s too hard. And that’s why people moved to the public cloud. But, in the end, private cloud is what people really want. So ZeroStack has set out to fix it.

This assessment – and mission statement – comes from Steve Garrison, vice president of marketing at the cloud infrastructure provider.

“If you’re frustrated with the available cloud solutions, look at ZeroStack,” says Garrison. “We think we’re really changing the game.”

Mountain View, CA-based ZeroStack provides a cloud-managed, on-premises cloud that is entirely GUI-based. While Garrison says companies like Nutanix and VMware are among its closest competitors, he adds that ZeroStack doesn’t care what hardware you use, is far more affordable than competing solutions, and is not as complex as VMware.

The company has a good basis of knowledge about the VMware strategy, as ZeroStack was established a couple years ago by senior engineers who came from VMware and Google. Garrison says one university customer spends 20 to 30 hours a week managing its VMware environment, but just one to two hours managing its ZeroStack environment.

Although ZeroStack believes organizations want private clouds, Garrison says the company is not pitting itself against the Amazons of the world. In fact, he notes, ZeroStack recently announced its membership to the Amazon Web Services’ Partner Network.

“Enterprises need more than one cloud to meet their operational needs, but they don’t want to have to invest in building up the expertise in order to run on-premises infrastructure,” he says. “By making our Cloud Platform available to the AWS community, we give AWS users a new cloud-managed, self-service infrastructure for on-premises environments.”

ZeroStack recently announced container support and utility billing, which means customers can be billed just for what they use, as they would with a public cloud service. And ZeroStack expects to announce a series of integrations with storage companies in the near future.