News Coverage

Premise: Rolling your own private cloud using OpenStack has been a high risk strategy for the vast majority of enterprises. The first five years of OpenStack’s life, the first epoch, was characterised by over-marketing and under-execution, founders going out of business (Nebula Inc), diversifying away (Rackspace), losing talent (PistonCloud’s CTO moving to Pivotal) or being acquired by the five tech titans (HP, Cisco, EMC, IBM, RedHat).

Last week, we took a closer look at the business and management considerations involved in building a private cloud. This week, we examine five private cloud vendors and what they have to offer in terms of management and administration, compatibility with your existing infrastructure investments, complexity in deployment and maintenance, and security.

The tenth release of OpenStack, “Juno,” last October, added a batch of new enterprise features aimed at boosting stability and performance and extending the reach of the open source tool to telecommunications and service provider datacenters.

This week the OpenStack Podcast’s guest rockstar was Sirish Raghuram. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Platform9 (www.platform9.com), and he’s also a former long-term VMware employee.

I have to be honest, Platform9 caught me by surprise at VFD4 with what seemed to be their answer for an AWS like offering.

For many data centers the most appealing part of the public cloud is the automated provisioning. Users or application owners simply define the type and amount of compute and storage they need and the public cloud automatically provisions the exact resources. Platform9 promises to deliver a public-cloud type of provisioning onto in-house infrastructure for authorized users, while satisfying IT/Ops policies.

You are at your desk when your CIO can be heard descending down from the marble floored, nicely painted floor above you. They stop and ask for an update on the private cloud initiatives. As you begin laying out all your options they quickly intervene quoting several articles they read in the in flight magazine on their return trip from Hawaii. The end of the conversation caps off with an “OpenStack, it’s all the rage, and we need to be doing it, so, do it!”

Platform9, which many people have taken note of as a virtualization-focused startup, is making news this week after it announced the availability of Platform9 Managed OpenStack, a SaaS solution that leverages an organization’s existing servers into an AWS-like agile, self-service private cloud.