At TechFieldDay 10 (TFD10), in Austin this past week we had a presentation from Platform9‘s Shirish Raghuram Co-founder and CEO and Bich Le, Co-founder and Chief Architect. Both Shirish and Bich seemed to have come from having worked a long time at VMware and prior to that, other tech giants.
Platform9 provides a user friendly approach to running OpenStack in your data center. Their solution is a SaaS based, management portal or control plane for running compute, storage and networking infrastructure under OpenStack, the open source cloud software.
Importing running virtualization environments
If you have a current, running VMware vSphere environment, you can onboard or import portions of or all of your VMs, datastores, NSX nodes, and the rest of the vSphere cluster and have them all come up as OpenStack core compute instances, Cinder storage volumes, and use NSX as a replacement for Neutron networking nodes.
In this case, once your vSphere environment is imported, users can fire up more compute instances, terminate ones they have, allocate more Cinder volumes, etc. all from an AWS-like management portal. It’s as close to an AWS console as I have seen.
Platform9 also works for KVM environments, that is you can import currently running KVM environments into OpenStack and run them from their portal.
Makes OpenStack, almost easy to run/use/operate
Historically, the problem with OpenStack was its user interface. Platform9 solves this problem and makes it easy to import, use, and deploy VMware and KVM environments into an OpenStack framework. Once there, users and administrators have the same level of control that AWS and Microsoft Azure users have, i.e., fire up compute instances, allocate storage volumes and attach the two together, terminate the compute activities, detach the volumes and repeat, all in your very own private cloud.
Bare metal OpenStack support too
If you don’t have a current KVM or VMware environment, Platform9 will deploy a KVM virtualization environment on bare metal servers and storage and use that for your OpenStack cloud.
Security comes from tenant attributes, certain tenants have access and control over certain compute/storage/networking instances.
Customers can also use Platform9 as a replacement for vCenter, and once deployed under OpenStack, tenants/users have control over their segments of the private cloud deployment.
It handles multiple vSphere & KVM clusters as well and can also handle mixed virtualization environments within the same OpenStack cloud.
A few things missing
The only things I found missing from the Platform9 solution was Swift Object storage support and support for Hyper-V environments.
The Platform9 team mentioned that multi-region support was scheduled to come out this week, so then your users could fire up compute and storage instances across your world wide data centers, all from a single Platform9 management portal.
Pricing for the Platform9 service is on a socket basis, with volume pricing available for larger organizations.
If you are interested in a private cloud and are considering OpenStack in order to avoid vendor lock-in, I would find it hard not to give Platform9 a try.
While at Dell
Later in the week, at TFD10 we talked with Dell, and they showed off their new VRTX Server product. Dell’s VRTX server is a very quiet, 4-server, 48TB tower or rackmount enclosure, which would make a very nice 8 or 16 socket CPU, private cloud for my home office environment (the picture doesn’t do it justice). And with a Platform9 control plane, I could offer OpenStack cloud services out of my home office, to all my neighbors around the world, for a fair but high price…
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