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Virtualisation Field Day 4 Preview: Platform9

January 8th, 2015

Virtualisation Field Day 4 is happening in Austin, Texas from 14th-16th January and I’m very lucky to be invited as a delegate.

I’ve been previewing the companies attending, have a look at my introductory post: Virtualisation Field Day 4 Preview.

 

Platform9 is new to Tech Field Day so we welcome them to VFD4 and they only came out of stealth 6 months ago. OpenStack’s issues are complexity and divergence and Platform9 intends to fix that with a cloud management model. You simply pull your hypervisors into Platform9 running as a 100% SaaS application.

Remember, OpenStack isn’t in itself a hypervisor, you have to provide your own (KVM or coming soon vSphere) but install an agent on your hosts and connect them into Platform9 and you have your OpenStack private cloud management done from the public cloud and set up in minutes.

Sure people are going to say that there are security and availability concerns but I bet VMware’s long term plans for the new vRealize Air is vSphere management from the cloud, Citrix has already announced it will be doing XenDesktop/XenApp management from the cloud and Microsoft is hinting the same thing. VM data won’t be transferring the bad old internet, just VM metadata over a secure connection so it’s not necessarily all security panic stations.

Platorm9 does a lot, multi-data center and multi-tenant support with policy based provisioning and quotas, you can pull in your existing workloads and still even use your existing tools. There are shared image catalogues and linked clones. Everything is obviously consumable via REST APIs and CLIs and users get a self service portal with developer libraries with off the shelf OpenStack tools with chef, puppet, vagrant and Jenkins included. Docker support will be coming as well.

Oh, the founders are all ex-VMware and helped build vCloud Director among other things so know their virtualisation and cloud stuff (hopefully the fact vCloud Director is being shelved doesn’t reflect on them ;-)).

OpenStack is chaotic at the moment but given it’s current momentum and obvious open source mojo, Platform9 is a company to watch, looking forward to hearing more.

Gestalt IT is paying for travel, accommodation and things to eat to attend Virtualisation Field Day but aren’t paying a penny for me to write anything good or bad about anyone.

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