Platform9 has announced the general availability of Platform9 Managed OpenStack, a SaaS solution that transforms an organization's existing servers into an AWS-like agile, self-service private cloud within minutes. The service enables organizations small or large to run their private clouds efficiently, at scale, and while leveraging latest open source innovations.
Today's release follows a successful six month beta where the service was tested by enterprises and service providers across diverse industries and geographies with 1000s of virtual machine deployments every day. In addition to supporting KVM environments today, Platform9 Managed OpenStack is now available in beta for VMware vSphere environments, with more than 20 customers participating in the beta. Support for Docker is in development, and a beta will be announced later this year.
Public clouds like AWS and elite technology firms like Google manage their infrastructure with efficient resource pooling, infrastructure automation and developer self-service. Organizations are looking to achieve the same level of agility and efficiency with a private cloud, thus enabling Devops workflows using their in-house infrastructure. OpenStack is the solution that customers turn to, since it is the leading open source project channeling innovations in cloud infrastructure. However, most organizations struggle to realize OpenStack's potential due to challenges in implementation — they may lack the skills required, end up creating greenfield silos, and often end up in professional service engagements with questionable ROI.
"CIOs are looking to transform their highly virtualized datacenters into private cloud infrastructures, delivering greater management automation and efficiency to their organizations. They have been evaluating open source projects like OpenStack and KVM, but needed simplifications to the packaging and operational experience," said Mark Bowker, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "Platform9's OpenStack-as-a-Service model simplifies the operational experience for OpenStack to make it accessible to a wide range of organizations. This innovative new approach to private cloud management could trigger the inflection point for OpenStack and private clouds we've been waiting for."
"Today, Platform9 is disrupting the complexity barrier to private clouds with Platform9 Managed OpenStack — its SaaS simplicity, production readiness, and seamless integration with existing environments enable every organization to manage their in-house infrastructure with greater agility and efficiency," said Sirish Raghuram, co-founder and CEO of Platform9. "It is especially satisfying that we're able to experience the benefits of an OpenStack based private cloud, by using our product just as our customers do. Over the past six months, we have moved all of our dev/test workloads from the public cloud to a Platform9 managed private cloud, thus realizing significant cost savings and development agility."
"Enterprises that outgrow their initial use of public clouds are looking for a cloud platform to manage their in-house infrastructure," said Udy Gold, senior director of infrastructure at PubMatic, a beta customer for Platform9 Managed OpenStack. "We're very impressed with Platform9's simplicity, and how easily it integrated with our existing infrastructure. It's the simplest path to a private cloud."
"Platform9 is one of the easiest products we have stood up to support our existing datacenter environment," said Dorren Schmitt, manager, System Administration at The Weather Channel, a beta customer for Platform9 Managed OpenStack. "We were able to get all of our hosts and virtual machines for one datacenter into Platform9 in a half day. It is an easy, intuitive solution to use."
Platform9 and the OpenStack Foundation
Platform9 recently joined the OpenStack Foundation as a Corporate Sponsor. Mark Collier, COO of the OpenStack Foundation, said, "Companies like Platform9 add to the depth and diversity of consumption options and application use cases available in OpenStack. Many enterprise customers want a simpler deployment path for OpenStack private cloud, and additional choices are a plus for them. We welcome the Platform9 team's engineering contributions and insights to the OpenStack community."
This article was originally posted “Platform9 Releases SaaS OpenStack Solution For Enterprise Infrastructure” from Cloud Strategy Magazine.
