Platform9 Makes Self-Service Private Clouds Easy for VMware Customers; Releases Managed OpenStack for vSphere

1st Solution to Enable 100% Interoperability of OpenStack with VMware vSphere; Accelerates OpenStack Adoption Amongst VMware Customers

Sunnyvale, CA − August 18, 2015 − Platform9, the company making private clouds easy, today announced general availability of Platform9 Managed OpenStack for VMware vSphere environments which it will showcase at VMworld in booth #339 later this month. Platform9 Managed OpenStack is a SaaS solution that transforms an organization’s existing servers into an AWS-like agile, self-service private cloud within minutes and has been in production globally for KVM environments since January 2015. Support for Docker is in development; a beta will be announced later this year.

Today Platform9 also announced that it has raised $10 million in Series B funding from Menlo and Redpoint Ventures: https://platform9.com/company/press/Platform9-raises-$10Million-in-funding-from-Menlo-and-Redpoint-ventures-to-meet-accelerating-demand-for-openstack-private-clouds.html.

VMware vSphere is the leading virtualization platform, estimated to run on more than six million physical servers in the enterprise. However, VMware customers looking to derive greater infrastructure agility — resource pooling, infrastructure automation and developer self-service — have had limited success. OpenStack, the world’s leading private cloud platform, delivers all of these capabilities but has had limited support for VMware vSphere. In addition, many VMware enterprise customers lack deep OpenStack skills that are needed to operate OpenStack in production, making it difficult for them to realize the framework’s true potential.

“Platform9 has broken down the installation and operational barriers that have challenged OpenStack adoption,” said Paul Burns, principal analyst for cloud computing at Neovise. “Now – with Platform9 Managed OpenStack for VMware vSphere – private cloud adopters also get improved choice and control over virtualization platforms. This enables applications to be matched with the right virtualization platform and gives VMware shops extensive private cloud functionality.”

Platform9 Managed OpenStack’s unique SaaS delivery model not only makes it easy for IT to quickly deploy an OpenStack private cloud but also provides ongoing operational support by including monitoring, troubleshooting and updates for OpenStack. With today’s announcement, Platform9 now fully supports VMware vSphere environments: a new VMware specific Virtual Appliance is now available to integrate the OpenStack controller services with vSphere resources. The Virtual Appliance works using vSphere APIs and is 100% interoperable with VMware vSphere, so operations can be performed either via the OpenStack control plane or via vSphere directly. The result is that for the first time, VMware customers have an easy to manage, fully interoperable solution to orchestrate their resources as an OpenStack-based private cloud.

“Platform9’s mission is to make private clouds easy to deploy and manage for the enterprise. By fully supporting VMware vSphere, we are enabling every VMware customer to instantly derive greater value and infrastructure agility from existing virtualized infrastructure,” said Sirish Raghuram, co-founder and CEO of Platform9. “Customers no longer need to choose between the world’s leading private cloud platform (OpenStack) and the world’s leading virtualization platform (VMware vSphere): Platform9 Managed OpenStack is 100% interoperable with VMware vSphere, allowing customers to integrate OpenStack and vSphere seamlessly. Developers can have self-service provisioning using OpenStack while at the same time, IT Operations manages the underlying infrastructure using vSphere.”

Today’s release follows a successful seven month beta for VMware vSphere customers where the service was tested by enterprises and service providers using VMware vSphere as their virtualization platform.

“Platform9 has been a very easy and non-disruptive path for us to enable self-service provisioning and API driven automation with our existing VMware resources,” said Ray Lovett, Sr. Network Architect at the Richards Group, a branding and full service advertising agency. “Having been longtime users of VMware vSphere, we were looking for a solution that allowed us to leverage OpenStack, while being very easy to manage and fully compatible with VMware vSphere. Platform9 Managed OpenStack delivers on both fronts.”

“Platform9 Managed OpenStack provides us with an easy to use self-service portal that we can extend to our customers. We can provide our users with self-service access to computing infrastructure with the ability to easily access Virtual Machine images, provision VMs and access VMs,” said Chris Church, Manager of Cloud Services at Orion Technology Services, a full-service technology provider specializing in cloud hosting, IT security and managed IT service. “At the same time, we have the flexibility to maintain and manage their environment via OpenStack’s built-in multi-tenancy. After evaluating other solutions, we found Platform9 much easier to use.”

Key Benefits for VMware Customers

• 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.

Pricing and Availability

Platform9 Managed OpenStack is now generally available with two tiers:

• Lite tier priced at $999 per year for small deployments or organizations testing OpenStack
• Enterprise tier for advanced features and premium support

Customers can start their free trial via https://www.platform9.com.

Additional Resources

To read a blog on today’s news by Kenneth Hui, Director of Technical Marketing at Platform9, go to: https://platform9.com/blog/the-easy-button-for-vmware-private-cloud-is-here.

About Platform9

Platform9’s mission is to make private clouds easy for organizations of any scale. The company’s service transforms an organization’s existing servers into an AWS-like agile, self-service on-premise cloud within minutes, enabling organizations small or large to run their private clouds efficiently, at scale, while leveraging the latest open source innovations. Powered by OpenStack, the service is the industry’s first 100% cloud-managed platform for KVM, VMware vSphere and Docker. Founded in 2013 by a team of early VMware engineers, Platform9 is backed by Menlo Ventures and Redpoint Ventures and headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif. For more information, visit: https://www.platform9.com, or follow Platform9 on Twitter @platform9sys.

Media and Analyst Contact:


Matt Coolidge
Bateman Group PR for Platform9
platform9@bateman-group.com

347-410-7974