Platform9 Promises Better Private Clouds with OpenStack SaaS

Platform9 is bringing the extreme scalability and flexibilty of AWS-style cloud computing to private clouds, the company said today in announcing Platform9 Managed OpenStack, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution tightly integrated with open source cloud and virtualization technologies.

OpenStack provides the tools organizations need to build highly agile clouds. Yet according to Platform9, “most organizations struggle to realize OpenStack’s potential due to challenges in implementation—they may lack the skills required, end up creating greenfield silos, and often end up in professional service engagements with questionable ROI.” The company’s SaaS OpenStack offering is designed to overcome this challenge by delivering “a 100% OpenStack API compatible, production ready configuration” that requires no special OpenStack expertise on the part of users.

That solution means any organization can use its own servers to build a private cloud that leverages the power of OpenStack to provide the flexibility and scalability that are more commonly possible to implement only by using public clouds, the company said.

Although Platform9 is not playing them up in announcing its SaaS OpenStack offering, there are also interesting security and privacy implications here, since the product makes it possible to deploy agile cloud environments without storing sensitive data on third-party servers. Of course, as a managed service, Platform9 OpenStack does not afford the kind of privacy of a cloud that is fully managed and run in-house. But it’s still probably a lot better than AWS or the like for organizations worried about data security, or that have compliance requirements to meet.

Platform9 Managed OpenStack supports the open source KVM hypervisor, and beta support is available for VMware vSphere, according to the company, adding that Docker support is in development, with a beta offering for the open source, container-based virtualization platform promised later this year.