Zeus Technology says that the largest problem facing enterprises is the difficulty of managing ever-more-complex IT environments. To help the IT channel fight that battle, today marks the announcement of the Zeus Elastic Application Delivery (ZEAD) platform, which provides a single interface for a scalable application management and delivery fabric that works across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. Here are some details.
Paul Brennan, CEO of Zeus Technology, says that while they’ve been in the web services market for about 15 years – they got their start building web servers, load balancers, and traffic monitors – the cloud clamor from their customers rose to a point they could no longer ignore, and starting this summer, they’ll have an answer for them.
That’s why the new version of ZEAD is aimed at giving VARs a “single point of reference,” as Brennan puts it, for deploying and scaling applications, whether they’re on-premises, in a public cloud, in a private cloud, or running inside a virtual machine. ZEAD supports any hypervisor you could name, from VMware to KVM to Xen and back, and works with cloud platforms like GoGrid and Amazon EC2.
The Zeus Techology press release also indicates that on certain cloud platforms (Amazon AWS, VMware vCloud, Rackspace Cloud and RightScale), ZEAD can auto-scale, boosting application capacity during peak times and lowering it when it’s quieted back down.
Brennan says that what sets Zeus Technology and ZEAD apart from their competitors is their software-based approach – companies like F5 Networks are their biggest competition, he says, and they can’t break a reliance on legacy models. Not so with Zeus: they want to give the partners that make up the entirety of their sales the ability to pick and choose how they deploy cloud applications.
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Hi Matthew,
Love your coverage in general, keep up the great work!
Just to clear something up, however, regarding the last portion of your article:
“Brennan says that what sets Zeus Technology and ZEAD apart from their competitors is their software-based approach – companies like F5 Networks are their biggest competition, he says, and they can’t break a reliance on legacy models.”
I’m not sure upon what information Mr. Brennan is basing his evaluation, but F5 offers a software-based version of its F5 BIG-IP LTM as a virtual network appliance today: http://www.softadc.com
On a related note, many of the ADC vendors (against which Zeus would claim to compete) today provide software versions of their offerings as virtual appliances including Citrix, KEMP, and of course a variety of open-source competitors that run as software that can be easily virtualized.
Thanks much,
Lori
(Full disclosure: I am an employee of F5 Networks)