ZeroStack Service Automates Spinning Up of Private Clouds

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One of the biggest challenges in all of enterprise IT is standing up a private cloud. There are so many pieces and parts among the complexities associated with building a private cloud that the average IT organization quickly becomes overwhelmed by both building the cloud and then maintaining it.

To address that issue, ZeroStack this week unfurled a namesake software-as-a-service (SaaS) application through which IT organizations can stand up a private cloud on a hyperconverged appliance in less than 30 minutes.

Fresh off raising $5.6 million in funding, ZeroStack CEO Ajay Gulati says the SaaS application provides a control plane based in the OpenStack framework in the cloud that is linked to 2u appliances via a set of open application programming interfaces (APIs) developed by ZeroStack. The end result, says Gulati, is a self-service private cloud that comes complete with compute, storage and networking resources that an internal IT organization can spin up on demand.

While most IT organizations, for a number of reasons, prefer private over public clouds, the growth rate of adoption of public clouds has dwarfed private clouds. A major reason for that, says Gulati, is not only the challenge associated with building a private cloud that scales, but also upgrading it over time.

In effect, Gulati says ZeroStack is abstracting away all that complexity via a private cloud environment that IT organizations can manage themselves via a Web user interface, or make available directly to developers via an API. In either case, the responsibility for creating the cloud management application as well as the management of the underlying hardware running on premise suddenly becomes someone else’s problem.