Platform9 Rolls out New Solution Aimed at Upleveling Virtualized Infrastructure On-Premises to “Developer-Friendly Environment”
Private cloud is the phrase du jour. IDC reports that 80% of companies say they have plans to repatriate portions of their workloads from public cloud to private data centers in the next years.
While the return to dedicated environments has long been predicted and is not a surprise, many companies are experiencing a shock. Legacy virtualized infrastructure like VMware has certain disadvantages. Key among them is limited infrastructure flexibility that has caused developer velocity to decline, delaying go-to-market.
And while cost is a key differentiator in private cloud, the vendor lock-in is blowing up costs unsustainably for on-prem users.
In October, Platform9 launched Private Cloud Director, a fully integrated platform solution that it says is the “most cost-effective, developer-friendly” private cloud solution in the market.
“Today, IT managers are stuck between the two tidal forces of public cloud and private cloud,” noted CTO, Roopak Parikh. “This is what I see as the Perigean spring tide of IT infrastructure today.”
Public cloud costs are getting ghastly for long-term operations and are a growing reason for CSPs’ shrinking foothold. Private cloud offers a more predictable and reasonable cost model but misses the premium white-glove experience.
The situation begs a solution that makes the infrastructure feature-rich, and akin to public cloud in the experience it offers, but without its mounting costs.
Parikh’s presentation at the recent Cloud Field Day, a Tech Field Day event from The Futurum Group, gave a glimpse of how Platform9 hopes to set a new standard for private cloud management with Private Cloud Director.
Private Cloud Director marks a significant step towards the company’s mission to modernize traditional virtualized environments with choice, control and composability.
“[Private Cloud Director] is an enterprise-grade, production-ready solution that has both containers as well as virtualization integrated in,” Parikh said.
Two key capabilities in the platform address the current-day challenges – production-ready virtualization and always-on assurance. For easy virtualization, Private Cloud Director offers advanced cluster resource management features, infrastructure self-service, ready cluster blueprints and software-defined networking that allow for comprehensive, low-effort management in private cloud.
With a built-in open-source feature, Project vJailbreak, users can easily migrate their VMs and infrastructure configs, an otherwise heavy lift that is notoriously complex and process-heavy. Currently, this feature supports VMware migrations only, but down the road, Platform9 will add support for other open-source environments as well.
Always-on assurance affords the ability to run clusters with high-availability (HA), in-place upgrades, resource balancing and elastic scalability expanding to hundreds of clusters.
Platform9 offers operational SLAs and uptime management with a history of continuously exceeding its commitments, the company says.
Parikh pointed to its open extensibility architecture as the secret sauce for providing greater composability to users. Private Cloud Director offers Kubernetes and related platform extensions making it easier to leverage both open-source infrastructure as well as cloud-native services.
It is offered both as a SaaS-managed solution with always-on assurance, as well as self-hosted for security or sovereign use cases.
Platform9 leaves the choice of infrastructure to the users maintaining high compatibility with all major server, storage and networking vendors.
“We believe this is the most cost-effective, developer-friendly solution that’s out there,” Parikh said.
Founded by four ex-VMware engineers, Platform9 has a decade-long record of running production workloads for customers worldwide. At present, the company manages 10,000 hypervisors and has been doing in-place upgrades since 2016.
Watch Chris Jones’s demo to learn how to easily migrate virtualized infrastructure in bulk from VMware to Private Cloud Director from Cloud Field Day at Techfieldday.com.
