SUNNYVALE, CA — (Marketwired) — 01/20/15 — Platform9, the company making private clouds easy, today 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 everyday. 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, Sr. 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.”
Customers can sign up and use Platform9 Managed OpenStack without any OpenStack expertise. They get a 100% OpenStack API compatible, production ready configuration and can focus on using their cloud rather than spending time and money implementing it.
Platform9 Managed OpenStack fully supports greenfield and brownfield environments so customers can easily import existing environments, including servers, storage, networks and workload configurations.
Because of its SaaS delivery model, Platform9 Managed OpenStack works seamlessly across multiple geographies, enabling customers to save costs by consolidating their distributed infrastructure into a single private cloud. In addition, since Platform9 Managed OpenStack supports multiple virtualization / container technologies, customers have the freedom to use the virtualization or container technology most suitable to specific applications or projects.
Platform9 Managed OpenStack delivers OpenStack–s distributed services in a fully tuned and tested configuration, thus being ready for the most demanding enterprise workloads. It is being used in environments with 1000s of virtual machine deployments everyday and by customers running infrastructure distributed across continents.
Unlike public clouds that offer Service SLAs, enterprise IT is responsible for their private cloud SLA. Platform9 Managed OpenStack comes with a Service SLA that IT can rely upon: the service is continuously monitored by Platform9–s internal telemetry for availability and operational health.
Seamless, non-disruptive updates are built into Platform9 Managed OpenStack. The service receives minor fixes and updates periodically, but like other SaaS services, this is transparent to customers. In addition, the service seamlessly upgrades to stable OpenStack releases annually, so customers can also leverage enhancements in OpenStack itself.
Platform9 Managed OpenStack is now generally available with three tiers:
1. Lite is a free tier for those testing or learning about OpenStack, and is limited in scale
2. Business tier with unlimited scale is priced at $49 per CPU per month (annual subscription required)
3. Enterprise tier for advanced features and premium support
Customers can sign up for the Lite tier or start their free Business/Enterprise trial via .
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.”
Platform9–s mission is to make private clouds easy for organizations of any scale. The company–s OpenStack powered service transforms an organization–s existing servers into an AWS-like agile, self-service private cloud within minutes, enabling organizations small or large to run their private clouds efficiently, at scale, and while leveraging latest open source innovations. The service is the 1st 100% cloud managed platform for KVM, VMware vSphere and Docker. Founded in 2013 by a team of early VMware engineers, Platform9 is backed by Redpoint Ventures and headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA. For more information, visit:, or follow Platform9 on Twitter @platform9sys.
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Amber Rowland
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