MSP-focussed Virtuozzo goes all-in on AI

Hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI) supplier Virtuozzo has converged its several products into the single Virtuozzo Infrastructure System (V/IS) and focussed it on AI, saying it’s built with AI, by AI, and for AI.

The company has a VMware migration alternative which is attractive to small and medium businesses who have been sidelined by VMware owner Broadcom with substantial price rises. Virtuozzo is mostly focussed on providing its software to MSPs, 90 percent of its revenues, so that they can host tenant SMBs, and also SaaS businesses. It’s now unifying its products under an AI banner seeing that as a defining and substantial market trend. Virtuozzo customers can offer AI-as-a-Service and GPU-as-a-Service using VIS for both training and inference workloads. GPU metering and management were added to Virtuozzo’s admin panel in its most recent product release.

CEO Kurt Daniel said: “AI is pivotal to how we develop our product today, how it operates and how our users benefit from it. Our Infrastructure System is co-designed to ensure maximum performance and efficiency from modern hardware, helping our customers and partners run and monetize AI with better utilization, lower overhead, and 60-80 percent less total cost of ownership (TCO) with a typical hosting setup versus competitive offerings.”

Daniel told us in a briefing: “We’re an operating system company, like Red Hat, SUSE, Microsoft and VMware.”

Until recently, Virtuozzo was run by its founder Serg Bell, but he stepped back to become Chief Constructor, a kind of business visionary role, and Daniel was appointed as CEO in February. He tells us Bell “helps with some product vision and that kind of stuff. And he's able to do that for these other companies. He did that for Acronis when it went through a bad time. He basically came in, rescued them, basically had them completely focus on MSPs and it turned out beautifully. Now they're a 400 to 500 million ARR company and they just growing really well and had a great exit.”

The component parts of VIS are;

• V/OS (Operating System) — An optimized Linux kernel foundation supporting both virtual machines (VMs) and containers to deliver near bare-metal performance, minimal overhead, and maximum workload density. 
•  V/Orchestration — Unified orchestration across compute, storage, networking and Kubernetes environments to enable seamless design, deployment and scaling of the infrastructure for any type of AI workload.
•  V/Management — Centralized control and visibility across infrastructure and services, designed to optimize resource utilization, maximize productivity, and simplify operations at any scale. 
•  V/Automation — Built-in automation for provisioning, billing, and customer management, enabling providers to launch and monetize AI and GPU services without separate costly external systems.
•  V/Protection — Integrated [Acronis] backup, disaster recovery, and cybersecurity with compute, storage and networking to ensure resilience for critical, data-intensive AI environments. 

V/IS used to be presented as having four subsystems (SKUs), and they are now being combined 

V/IS - infrastructure

V/Server - compute

V/Storage - software-defined object, block and file storage

V/AM - application management.

There is also a cloud-based V/Cloud offer hosted by Virtuozzo.

Daniel said: “We're going to take that simplicity approach as opposed to an Oracle approach or VMware approach, where you have a million SKUs and it's priced at the maximum premium just to go after those really large enterprises. We do have some large enterprises as customers, but it's not our focus.”

Virtuozzo is producing code with AI, Daniel saying: “We're using all sorts of AI tools internally and seeing good results, not just to impress the CEO and the board, but we're actually generating significant amounts of code that's working well and getting into production.” He also said that the software is built to be efficient: “It's an operating system that's specialised for efficiency.”

There are competitors offering roughly similar software. For example, Virtuozzo’s V/IS has some overlap with Zadara, which provides sovereign AI edge clouds, and its virtualized datacenter idea.

There is some overlap with Nutanix but the two rarely if ever meet as Nutanix has an enterprise customer focus. Daniel said both Nutanix and Zadara were typically way more expensive than Virtuozzo.

There is also some software overlap with HCI business Scale Computing but that business also sells hardware, unlike Virtuozzo, and has an enterprise and SMB, but not MSP, focus.

Virtuozzo, with its 250+ employees, operates in more than 80 countries and has around 550 MSP and channel partners. Daniel says its growth rate is accelerating. What’s apparent to us is that Virtuozzo’s customers are all interested in offering AI-related services to their customers; becoming neoclouds as it were. 

V/IS is available to partners and customers worldwide. For more information, click this link.