ZeroStack adds a new dimension to their original offering, and lays out the road map for the next two stages of their technology rollout, both of which are scheduled for later this year.
Steve Garrison, ZeroStack’s vice president of marketing
Mountain View CA-based ZeroStack makes a Cloud Platform that enables the simple installation and operation of a scale-out private cloud. They first brought the product to market about a year ago. Now they have announced an extension of its capabilities with a suite of machine learning-based artificial intelligence capabilities. Terming this ZeroStack 2.0, they also announced their roadmap for the next two stages of their offering, both of which are scheduled to roll out later in 2017.
“When we launched our platform we still needed one thing,” said Steve Garrison, ZeroStack’s vice president of marketing. “We needed the data. We needed telemetry data over a substantial time frame so we could make meaningful algorithms. If you have a processing engine but no data its hard to learn. Now we have really added a second level of capabilities because the learning engine now has enough data to make the algorithms.”
ZeroStack is terming the addition of the AI capability to its platform ZeroStack 2.0. The ability of the cloud platform to use the telemetry data through machine learning lets customers make decisions about capacity planning, and optimize placement of applications, including VM sizing.
‘Hands-free’ upgrading capability has also been added.
“Just upgrading parts of the cloud is a big task, and with this AI capability, we have now automated that,” Garrison said. “It will help people get the cost metrics and SLAs they believe they should have. You don’t have to overprovision, or guess how many resources you need.”
ZeroStack goes to market entirely through channel partners, and Garrison said that this new artificial intelligence capability will make it a lot easier to overcome customer objections.
“The challenge for partners has been that there is a barrier to adoption of cloud,” he indicated. “Many partners say they can’t sell cloud because their midmarket customers don’t have the budgets or time to develop cloud teams of architects. The self-driving infrastructure mindset gives them this capability, and lowers the barrier to cloud adoption.”
ZeroStack also announced the next two stages along the road map, which it is terming ZeroStack 3.0 and ZeroStack 4.0.
“With infrastructure, people want to know where you are going, so we are talking about the road map so they see where we are going,” Garrison stated. “ZeroStack 3.0 is cloud optimization, knowing which cloud should be used for a particular workload. ZeroStack 4.0 is performance troubleshooting, determining what the issue is if applications are doing poorly.”
Both of these are due this year. Garrison said ZeroStack 3.0 is scheduled for the summer, while ZeroStack 4.0 should be out in the fall.
ZeroStack has been expanding its presence on other platforms, making its Cloud Platform software available on hyper-converged hardware from Dell and HP Enterprise last summer. ZeroStack also added high-availability (HA) functionality, with the main purpose being to make OpenStack more attractive to VMware customers, since OpenStack lacks native HA capability. Garrison indicated that they will be building on this OpenStack initiative with an upcoming announcement of API integration with OpenStack.
“This is a reinforcement of the partnering strategy that was central to our Dell and HPE partnerships last year,” Garrison said. “Communities are essential for cloud, because the cloud touches everything, and OpenStack APIs are a common glue in this.”
