Platform9 announced the most recent release of its products Platform9 KubeVirt and Platform9 Managed Kubernetes (PMK) to address the most pressing budget, staffing, and operational efficiency challenges enterprises are facing in today's tight economy.

As CEOs and CFOs step in to assess costs at all levels, IT leaders are faced with a number of challenging tasks, including controlling cloud costs, lowering legacy vendor license fees, optimizing staffing, and improving operational efficiencies.

With this release, Platform9 can help enterprises migrate 100s and even 1000s of virtual machines from legacy virtualization products, driving down costs in several ways:

• Save by product consolidation and reduced license fees: Replace multiple legacy virtualization products and their extremely expensive enterprise licensing fees.
• Save enormous public cloud bills by repatriating to on-premises or co-location infrastructure: Migrate to another environment for a fraction of the cost of public cloud.
• Eliminate the need for costly hardware investments. Run legacy VMs on a modern self-service virtualization solution on existing infrastructure.
• Save on operation costs: Leverage built-in automation for multiple operational tasks such as lifecycle management, monitoring, alerting, self-healing, security patching, and troubleshooting

"To optimize spending, businesses today are reducing the number of enterprise virtualization products and vendors with very expensive license fees," said Bhaskar Gorti, CEO of Platform9. "Platform9's latest release unifies, in a single platform, the capabilities of many legacy products including virtualization, container management, monitoring, bare metal management, management plane, and much more. Adopting a platform-based approach such as this for infrastructure management can help reduce costs by consolidating and eliminating redundant products and operational overhead."

Platform9's approach is unifying and consolidating capabilities available in multiple legacy products into one platform. The latest 5.8 release incorporates the most recent open-source versions of Kubernetes (for container management) and KubeVirt (for VM management), including many infrastructure services for monitoring, load balancing, logging, networking, and much more.

Platform9 KubeVirt has a modern user interface and terminology that both VM and infrastructure operators are familiar with. IT teams that are adopting the platform do not need to understand the underlying Kubernetes complexity, which reduces onboarding and training time. Engineering teams who are currently developing and delivering cloud native applications, on the other hand, may leverage the full power of Kubernetes on the same platform.

Platform9 5.8 KubeVirt includes several improvements to VM performance, scalability, monitoring, and reliability, significantly matching legacy VM functionality at a lower cost. Notable capabilities include:

• Guaranteed 99.9% uptime SLA through remote monitoring and alerting: Platform9 management plane remote monitoring is now extended to KubeVirt services. You can now act on alerts round-the-clock to ensure your VMs' availability.
• Tested at scale: Rigorous scale-testing to ensure that the platform can run in a variety of scale situations: a few nodes in thousands of locations (for edge use cases) and hundreds of nodes in a few locations (data center or public cloud regions use case).
• Advanced networking with OVS and performance add-ons: Leverage DPDK, SRIOV and other built-in features to run your networking processes at line speed.

"Enterprises today face an ever-increasing need for agility and cost-effectiveness to thrive in a challenging economic environment," said Madhura Maskasky, VP of product and co-founder of Platform9. "With Platform9 5.8, we're delivering a unified virtualization and containerization platform that is secure, scalable, and easy to manage - giving enterprises the flexibility to deploy, orchestrate, maintain, and observe infrastructure across any cloud, edge, or on-premises infrastructure."