When you're running a cloud business, two things keep you up at night: performance and costs. You want blazing-fast virtual machines, but you don't want to sell your kidney to afford the infrastructure. Serverspace, an international cloud provider serving over 5,000 clients across seven countries, faced exactly this challenge. Their solution? A strategic partnership with vStack's hyperconverged platform that cut VM creation time to just one second and slashed costs in half.
Serverspace had been operating for over 14 years, building a solid reputation with data centers in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Netherlands, and the United States. Like many providers, they initially chose VMware as their virtualization backbone. It made sense—VMware was the industry standard with proven reliability and global recognition.
But here's the catch: VMware comes with some serious baggage.
First, there's the hardware requirement. You need enterprise-grade equipment, which means expensive purchases and ongoing maintenance costs. Then there's the licensing burden—VMware's fees add up quickly. Finally, and perhaps most painfully, you need a whole team of highly specialized administrators to keep everything running. In traditional virtualization setups, your infrastructure has separate components for compute, storage, and networking, often from different vendors. One or two people simply can't manage that complexity.
For Serverspace, this meant high operational costs that would eventually get passed on to customers—something that went against their core mission of making cloud infrastructure simple and affordable for everyone.
After crunching the numbers, Serverspace's team realized they needed to shift from traditional convergence to hyperconvergence. The problem? VMware's HCI solution would be even more expensive, forcing them to raise prices for customers.
They considered building something on KVM and OpenStack—attractive because there are no licensing costs. But this route would require constant development work, serious infrastructure investment, and dedicated support staff. When they tested OpenStack under CPU overcommitment conditions, the performance results were disappointing, nowhere near what you'd expect from a public cloud.
That's when they discovered vStack, a hyperconverged platform from ITGLOBAL.COM LABS. Even though vStack was relatively new to the market in 2019, 👉 Serverspace saw potential in its modern approach to cloud infrastructure that could deliver enterprise performance without the enterprise price tag.
vStack's architecture changes the game by integrating everything—compute, storage, networking, and virtualization—into a single unified platform. Instead of juggling multiple vendor solutions and specialized hardware, you get vStack OS, vStack Storage, vStack Network, and vStack Management working together seamlessly.
Here's what that means in practice:
Single-pane management: One interface controls everything. You don't need separate specialists for storage, networking, and compute. One administrator can handle the whole infrastructure, dramatically reducing staffing costs and simplifying operations.
Hardware flexibility: You can build enterprise-level virtual data centers using consumer-grade hardware without sacrificing performance. This alone cuts costs significantly compared to VMware's enterprise hardware requirements.
CPU overcommitment strength: vStack excels at CPU overcommitment, which seriously boosts cost efficiency. This was a major win for Serverspace's business model.
Rapid scaling: Need to expand capacity? vStack makes it quick and painless. Hardware failures? Swap components without drama.
Smart snapshots: Unlike many platforms, vStack's VM snapshots capture the complete configuration, including virtual network ports. This seemingly small detail saves massive amounts of time during recovery or migration.
To maximize efficiency, Serverspace activated vStack's Managed Service, letting them focus on business growth instead of platform maintenance. The combination proved powerful.
With vStack handling part of their infrastructure alongside VMware, 👉 Serverspace climbed to the #1 position for VM performance among cloud providers. Creating a new virtual machine takes just one second on vStack. From request to fully operational VM? Between 15 and 40 seconds. And the kicker—those VMs cost customers half what they'd pay for VMware-based instances.
The partnership also created a feedback loop that benefits everyone. When Serverspace's clients need specific functionality, the vStack team can quickly implement customizations or platform updates. It's the kind of agility that larger, more established platforms simply can't match.
Serverspace's story illustrates an important shift happening in cloud infrastructure. The old model—expensive enterprise hardware, complex multi-vendor stacks, teams of specialists—is giving way to integrated platforms that deliver equivalent or better performance at a fraction of the cost.
For businesses evaluating cloud providers, this matters. Performance specs and uptime guarantees are important, but so is understanding what's under the hood. A provider running modern hyperconverged infrastructure can offer better economics, faster provisioning, and more responsive development—all of which translate to better service for you.
The cloud industry keeps evolving, and providers who embrace newer, more efficient architectures are positioned to offer better value. Serverspace's success with vStack shows that you don't have to choose between performance and affordability. With the right infrastructure decisions, you can have both.