Platform9

Platform9 Systems Inc. is a B2B cloud computing software company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. It provides technology and support for businesses to build and automate OpenStack- and Kubernetes-based cloud infrastructure as Software-as-a-Service on their existing servers. In other words, Platform9 enables enterprises to use their existing infrastructure and turn it into a fully managed private cloud. Platform9 currently supports VMware vsphere, KVM and Docker platforms. Platform9 has been named in the CRN's emerging vendors list in 2016.
History
The company was founded in 2013 by VMware veterans Sirish Raghuram, Madhura Maskasky, Bich Le and Roopak Parikh in Sunnyvale, California. The idea to start Platform9 came about as the founding engineers realized that the deployment and management paradigm for enterprise infrastructure was fundamentally inferior in comparison to public cloud architecture. The company’s initial product focus was to roll out an OpenStack private cloud easily, almost as easily as starting to use a public cloud such as AWS. Platform9 Managed OpenStack was launched in 2014 with initial support for KVM. Support for VMware vSphere infrastructure was added in 2015.It has received two rounds of funding: $4.5 million in Series A from Redpoint Ventures in August 2014 and $10 million in Series B from Redpoint and Menlo Ventures in August 2015.
OpenStack
The company sells Platform9 Managed OpenStack, a cloud management platform to automate the backend for OpenStack running in an existing or a new environment.Platform9 reduces operational complexity of private clouds, thereby presenting enterprises a choice between public and private clouds. OpenStack is deployed as an infrastructure-as-a-service software. Platform9 provides OpenStack-as-a-service using its Saas model for monitoring, deployment and scaling of private cloud. Platform9 also provides high-availability capability to its enterprise customers.
Motivation
Cloud and IT service providers are expected to provide public cloud features like scalability, reliability and deftness to user systems containing complex and obsolete software. Often, the architecture of these software packages wouldn't have been designed to run in a cloud infrastructure.In addition to this, the recent advancements in Open software such as the emerging diversity in virtualization, containers, distributed workload managers pose new challenges to IT service providers. For every new technology, a new management system has to be designed to accommodate them, as otherwise operating across multiple data-centers would prove to be a chaotic job. In order to keep up with the advancements and incorporate them in an already existing infrastructure, IT service providers need to do extensive research, zero-in on the software that would provide best results and fulfill all their business requirements and also learn the pros and cons of that software. Platform9 managed Openstack transforms existing infrastructures into a self service private cloud and makes deployment simpler. A wide range of software packages can be installed, configured and run using Platform9.
* Servers : Platform9 managed Openstack requires three servers preferably. The operating system in these servers should be one of the below listed Linux operating systems.
** CentOS/RedHat 7.2 for a 64-bit system (CentOS kernel)
** Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04 for a 64-bit architecture.
* Storage : 3 types of storage are required, namely Local storage to configure a hypervisor, a NFS share storage with which the hypervisor is configured and a Block storage.
* Network Interface : Every hypervisor is expected to have atleast one physical network interface, and Outbound HTTPS access to communicate with Platform9 configuration plane and VLAN sub-interfaces such as VLAN-based virtual machine traffic, Management VLAN, Tunneled GRE/VXLAN VLAN, External VLAN and a storage VLAN
Neutron network configuration
Once the hypervisors are configured, one or more physical servers can be added to Platform9 using the "Add host" button in the "Infrastructure" tab. After adding, the Platform9 host agent is downloaded and deployed in the linux server. Authorization of hosts is required before the hosts can be utilized, hence an alert appears in the Platform9 dashboard notifying the user that a new server is to be authorized before it can be completely deployed and used.
Companies with similar products
* Greenpages
* Bright Computing
* Canonical
* HP
* IBM
* Mirantis
* Oracle OpenStack for Oracle Solaris
* Red Hat
* SUSE

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