Platform9,
the company making private clouds easy, today announced general
availability of Platform9 Managed OpenStack for VMware vSphere
environments which it will showcase at VMworld in booth #339 later this
month. Platform9 Managed OpenStack is a SaaS solution that transforms an
organization's existing servers into an AWS-like agile, self-service
private cloud within minutes and has been in production globally for KVM
environments since January 2015. Support for Docker is in development; a
beta will be announced later this year.
Today Platform9 also announced that it has raised $10 million in Series B funding from Menlo and Redpoint Ventures.
VMware vSphere is the leading virtualization platform, estimated to run
on more than six million physical servers in the enterprise. However,
VMware customers looking to derive greater infrastructure agility --
resource pooling, infrastructure automation and developer self-service
-- have had limited success. OpenStack, the world's leading private
cloud platform, delivers all of these capabilities but has had limited
support for VMware vSphere. In addition, many VMware enterprise
customers lack deep OpenStack skills that are needed to operate
OpenStack in production, making it difficult for them to realize the
framework's true potential.
"Platform9 has broken down the installation and operational barriers
that have challenged OpenStack adoption," said Paul Burns, principal
analyst for cloud computing at Neovise. "Now -- with Platform9 Managed
OpenStack for VMware vSphere -- private cloud adopters also get improved
choice and control over virtualization platforms. This enables
applications to be matched with the right virtualization platform and
gives VMware shops extensive private cloud functionality."
Platform9 Managed OpenStack's unique SaaS delivery model not only makes
it easy for IT to quickly deploy an OpenStack private cloud but also
provides ongoing operational support by including monitoring,
troubleshooting and updates for OpenStack. With today's announcement,
Platform9 now fully supports VMware vSphere environments: a new VMware
specific Virtual Appliance is now available to integrate the OpenStack
controller services with vSphere resources. The Virtual Appliance works
using vSphere APIs and is 100% interoperable with VMware vSphere, so
operations can be performed either via the OpenStack control plane or
via vSphere directly. The result is that for the first time, VMware
customers have an easy to manage, fully interoperable solution to
orchestrate their resources as an OpenStack-based private cloud.
"Platform9's mission is to make private clouds easy to deploy and manage
for the enterprise. By fully supporting VMware vSphere, we are enabling
every VMware customer to instantly derive greater value and
infrastructure agility from existing virtualized infrastructure," said
Sirish Raghuram, co-founder and CEO of Platform9. "Customers no longer
need to choose between the world's leading private cloud platform
(OpenStack) and the world's leading virtualization platform (VMware
vSphere): Platform9 Managed OpenStack is 100% interoperable with VMware
vSphere, allowing customers to integrate OpenStack and vSphere
seamlessly. Developers can have self-service provisioning using
OpenStack while at the same time, IT Operations manages the underlying
infrastructure using vSphere."
Today's release follows a successful seven month beta for VMware vSphere
customers where the service was tested by enterprises and service
providers using VMware vSphere as their virtualization platform.
"Platform9 has been a very easy and non-disruptive path for us to enable
self-service provisioning and API driven automation with our existing
VMware resources," said Ray Lovett, Sr. Network Architect at the
Richards Group, a branding and full service advertising agency. "Having
been longtime users of VMware vSphere, we were looking for a solution
that allowed us to leverage OpenStack, while being very easy to manage
and fully compatible with VMware vSphere. Platform9 Managed OpenStack
delivers on both fronts."
"Platform9 Managed OpenStack provides us with an easy to use
self-service portal that we can extend to our customers. We can provide
our users with self-service access to computing infrastructure with the
ability to easily access Virtual Machine images, provision VMs and
access VMs," said Chris Church, Manager of Cloud Services at Orion
Technology Services, a full-service technology provider specializing in
cloud hosting, IT security and managed IT service. "At the same time, we
have the flexibility to maintain and manage their environment via
OpenStack's built-in multi-tenancy. After evaluating other solutions, we
found Platform9 much easier to use."
Key Benefits for VMware Customers
- Self-Service Automation. Empowering developers is a
key CIO priority in the enterprise. With multi-tenancy, quotas, leases
and policy controls on resource configurations for workloads, Platform9
Managed OpenStack makes it easy for IT to implement self-service for
developers and accelerate their workflows.
- 100% Interoperability with VMware vSphere.
Customers can perform any choice of operations via Platform9 Managed
OpenStack or via VMware vSphere: therefore, all existing processes,
vSphere-based API automation and 3rd party products are compatible and
supported.
- Orchestration using Open, Industry Standard APIs.
OpenStack APIs are supported by a wide range of automation tools,
development libraries, storage and network systems and application-level
orchestration frameworks. By orchestrating their infrastructure using
OpenStack APIs, organizations not only reduce reliance on proprietary
ecosystems, but also accelerate API driven infrastructure automation and
leverage existing open source integrations.
- Single Pane Across Virtualization Platforms.
Platform9 now supports both KVM and VMware vSphere virtualization and
Docker support is expected in future. Customers can now decouple their
private cloud platform from the virtualization platform, and retain the
flexibility to deploy new platforms over time while maintaining a
consistent workflow and management interface.
- Compatibility with all vSphere Compatible
Datastores and Networks. Customers can onboard Platform9 with any
storage and network implementation that is compatible with VMware
vSphere. The solution is fully compatible with both legacy VLAN-based
networks as well as software-defined-networks.
- Production Grade SLA for OpenStack. Platform9
takes care of monitoring, troubleshooting and upgrading the OpenStack
framework, so customers can rely on a production grade SLA and focus on
innovation enabled by the OpenStack cloud platform.
To read a blog on today's news by KennethHui, Director of Technical Marketing at Platform9, go to: http://blog.platform9.com/the-easy-button-for-vmware-private-cloud-is-here.
Pricing and Availability
Platform9 Managed OpenStack is now generally available with two tiers:
1. Lite tier priced at $999 per year for small deployments or organizations testing OpenStack
2. Enterprise tier for advanced features and premium support
Customers can start their free trial via http://www.platform9.com.