Designed for intelligent data centres of the future, it provides a complete set of APIs to flexibly manage resource such as computing, storage, and networks. You can use it to set up various cloud environments, such as Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS).
Blog | Comparing Alibaba Cloud ZStack with VMware and Nutanix
July 22nd 2020
Comparing Alibaba Cloud ZStack with VMware and Nutanix
What is ZStack?
Alibaba Cloud ZStack is the next-generation open-source cloud computing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) software.
Designed for intelligent data centres of the future, it provides a complete set of APIs to flexibly manage resource such as computing, storage, and networks. You can use it to set up various cloud environments, such as Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS).
Which HCI should you choose?
Alibaba Cloud ZStack offers the newest generation of OpenStack technology with unified hybrid cloud management. Offering a highly inexpensive hyperconverged platform.
Resource Utilization The overall resource utilization rate is typically 10% -15% without ZStack, but is increased to more than 60% by leveraging a ZStack solution.
High Performance ZStack deploys hundreds of VMs in a few minutes, performance increase of 200% compared with other providers
Scalability ZStack uses technologies such as full asynchronous architecture and in-process microservices to achieve second-level creation of cloud computing.
VMware vSAN is an enterprise-class storage virtualization software that offers hyperconverged infrastructure and hybrid cloud to manage compute and storage with a single platform.
Seamless evolution vSAN is native to vSphere and requires no additional tools.
Industry-leading flexibility vSAN ecosystem offers ability to run HCI on certified solutions with preferred vendor.
Multi-cloud capabilities vSAN provides consistent operations from edge to core to cloud with intrinsic security throughput.
Nutanix is an enterprise cloud software built on hyperconverged infrastructure technology that unifies private, public and distributed clouds to power businesses.
Modernized Datacenter Enterprise cloud built with hyper-converged compute, storage, virtualization and networking at the core. Simple to use Run apps and workloads on a single platform with exceptional availability, performance and simplicity.
Ease of management Move apps and data between public, private and edge clouds with ease.
ZStack, VMware and Nutanix address the issue of deficient traditional architecture by increasing the efficiency of available resources and simplifying the management processes. All three are infrastructure solutions (HCI) which look to integrate processing, network, memory and storage in the same cluster or container.
Both also feature single data stores where all disks of each nodes are joined and presented to all the hosts that are apart of the cluster, allowing for scalable growth.
Nutanix, unlike VMware, features the ability to choose hardware and virtualization platforms that best suit each business platform. With this, Nutanix does not require additional licensing and does not rely on a network solution which reduces cost on infrastructure and skilled labour. In contrast, VMware requires additional licensing if infrastructure is not already VMware-based as vSAN is built into vSphere, specific licensing is needed to use the software.
Cost-Benefit can undoubtedly be a determining factor between choosing between Nutanix and VMware for many companies. As we outweigh the pros and cons of each, both are very complete tools that excel differently by factoring an enterprise's business scenario. The newly rising competitor, being Alibaba Cloud ZStack, offers many advantageous software features at an significantly inexpensive price point compared to its competitors.
More about Alibaba Cloud ZStack
Resource Utilization
The overall resource utilization rate is typically 10% -15% without ZStack, but is increased to more than 60% by leveraging a ZStack solution.
When compared with other private cloud solutions such as VMWare, ZStack delivers a substantial cost reduction of up to 50%.
High Performance
ZStack deploys hundreds of VMs in a few minutes, performance increase of 200% compared with other providers
Through cloud computing technology, end-user operations are simple and data resource search time is greatly reduced. The same search use case improves the search performance by more than 10 times.
Scalability
ZStack uses technologies such as full asynchronous architecture and in-process microservices to achieve second-level creation of cloud computing.
ZStack can manage 10,000+ hosts and 100,000 VM instances on a single management node. It can also create 100+ VM instances in minutes.
Ease Of Deployment
A ZStack deployment takes as little as 30 minutes to set up in a proof of concept (POC) environment
It used to take days or even weeks to deploy a business system. After implementing the ZStack for Alibaba Cloud platform, deployment can be reduced to as little as a few minutes.