With the news of a $10 million Series B funding round Platform9 announced the GA of its SaaS solution Managed OpenStack for VMware vSphere.
Platform9 solutions leverages a mix of SaaS and on premises Virtual Appliance to provide into supported environments capabilities typical of Cloud Management Platforms (CMPs) such self-service provisioning, monitoring, configuration management, etc.
With this new release Platform9 aims to enable VMware administrators to easily deploy and run an OpenStack-based private cloud with a new VMware specific Virtual Appliance which integrates the OpenStack controller services with vSphere resources.
The appliance leverages vSphere APIs and is 100% interoperable with VMware vSphere allowing the operations to be performed either via the OpenStack control plane or via vSphere directly.
Supposedly Platform9 is trying to ride the VMware-OpenStack integration increasing demand taking advantage of the cold reception of VIO.
Some of the features provided to VMware users:
- 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.