RackSpace buys ZeroVM
RackSpace has announced that they have purchased the Israeli start-up ZeroVM. Terms of the deal have not been immediately released. ZeroVM is a solution for provisioning servers that will function in a cloud environment. The deal allows RackSpace to take over ZeroVM’s current office in Tel Aviv and use it as a research and development facility.
RackSpace started out as a web hosting company and through the course of time, RackSpace has morphed into a global provider of dedicated servers and cloud infrastructure. Using ZeroVM’s provisioning platform, RackSpace will be able to deploy cloud services to new clients at a much faster speed. This move keeps RackSpace competitive in the global private cloud services market while trimming their bottom line and turnaround time on new orders.
RackSpace positions itself to compete with services like Amazon and Google by acquiring ZeroVM. I is predicted that demand for cloud services will skyrocket through the rest of this decade and the biggest untapped market it the small to medium enterprises. RackSpace already serves this market well which is another reason this move makes sense. RackSpace can convert ZeroVM in order to sell cloud services to an untapped market.
ZeroVM separates itself from other hyper visors by taking key elements of the operating system needed to run the applications and emulating the rest of the operating system as needed. While other hyper visors are several megabytes, ZeroVM runs much lighter by only using 75 kilobytes of space. This is a game changer within the cloud infrastructure because many companies haven’t been able to offer these services with such small memory overhead. RackSpace will certainly enjoy ZeroVM’s services because in traditional environments, it takes up to 2 minutes to deploy a new virtual server into a cloud environment. Using ZeroVM, this same action can be completed in under 5 milliseconds making this acquisition a big win for RackSpace.
