Platform9, a Sunnyvale, CA-based company that helps organizations develop private clouds in minutes, emerged from stealth today. The company also announced the finalization of $4.5M in Series A funding from Redpoint Ventures. Platform9 delivers a SaaS platform that empowers users to spin up OpenStack-based infrastructures for purposes such as development, testing and production-grade application deployment. Customers can use Platform9’s SaaS interface to install an agent onto the servers selected for inclusion in the requisite private cloud environment. Platform9’s proprietary technology subsequently discovers and aggregates the designated infrastructure components to create a private cloud that can be accessed by users that have been granted requisite access privileges. Once the private cloud has been created, users can leverage dashboards such as the following to monitor their infrastructure:
Platform9 aims to enhance customer agility by providing select teams with the opportunity to provision and create infrastructures at will. Importantly, the platform features a set of constraints on the ability of users to create private clouds that correspond to user roles and responsibilities within the organization. In all, Platform9 attempts to bring the radical simplicity of the Amazon Web Services deployment model to the private cloud space within the enterprise by way of a platform that supports Docker, KVM and VMware vSphere technologies and additionally boasts all of the benefits specific to OpenStack’s interoperability and rich set of APIs. Founded by a team of veterans from VMware, the company plans to release its technology from Beta into general availability by the end of the year. Platform9’s focus on streamlining the deployment and management of private clouds amongst enterprise customers aims at a sweet spot within the cloud space that is likely to grow as organizations continue to choose to begin with private clouds before graduating to public cloud deployments.
Cloud Computing Today 