Hosting Options for Every Enterprise

Select enterprises can get the value of Platform9’s control-plane on-premises in addition to our private cloud deployment model

Introduction

Platform9’s architecture enables SaaS-managed private clouds across any hardware, anywhere. This model is unique to Platform9, and allows us to  monitor ongoing cloud operations, detecting and analyzing issues, resolving them via patch releases and upgrading the cloud platform to newer versions.

This document outlines Platform9 cloud control plane hosting options for enterprises and service-providers.

Platform9-Hosted Control Plane

With rapid growth of the public-cloud (where data resides in the cloud provider’s infrastructure), and increased awareness of the operational savings possible via SaaS solutions, most enterprises look to this model to increase IT efficiency. As with most SaaS solutions, Platform9 has been designed with security being a top consideration, and has been approved by Info-Sec teams at numerous enterprises.

For these reasons, Platform9-hosted controller is the recommended hosting option, and the one that most enterprises select.

Advantages of a Platform9-hosted controller model:

1. Quickest time to value
2. Availability: Platform9 is responsible for availability and performance of hosting infrastructure (included in Platform9 SLA)
3. Security & Updates: Platform9 is responsible for securing and updating the hosted infrastructure
4. Problem resolution: Platform9 guarantees end-to-end problem resolution SLAs

Self-Hosted Control Plane

Certain enterprises and service-providers – such as those in sensitive and highly regulated industries – prefer to host all management software on-premises to comply with organizational policies and government regulations. These enterprises can still leverage Platform9 using their own infrastructure and operational investments to self-host our control plane on-premises.

As shown in the diagram above, the self-hosted control plane runs on a set of servers inside the customer’s infrastructure, either on-premises or in a colocation facility. For high-availability, each unique “Region” requires 3 servers, each running the control plane for that Region.

In order to provide our operational SLAs, the servers hosting the control plane should have outbound HTTPS connectivity to Platform9’s monitoring service. Platform9’s SaaS services do not require any other access to the enterprise infrastructure, under normal operations.

This hosting option requires the enterprise IT team to take full control and responsibility over the location, availability and security of the infrastructure hosting the cloud platform. Private cloud users access the Platform9 Managed OpenStack private cloud by using an internal url.

Infrastructure Specifications

1. 3 servers per region with identical resource configuration
2. Each server should be:
   • A physical machine
   • 24 physical cores (2×12 or 4×6) of CPU
   • 128GB RAM
   • 2 NICs bonded w/ LACP
   • 256 GB SSD RAID 1+0
3. Software requirements:
   • CentOS / RHEL 7.1 or Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
   • Outbound access (port 443) to Platform9’s monitoring service

Platform9-Hosted v/s Self-Hosted Comparison

For quick reference, the two hosting options are compared below.

Summary

Every enterprise can experience Platform9’s industry leading cloud platform, regardless of the need to conform to organization info-sec policies and government regulations. Please contact your Platform9 customer success team for further questions and recommendations.