Platform Computing has unveiled its cloud management system, enabling customers to build and run their private clouds.
Platform claims that the systems can go beyond what server virtualisation can offer by creating a shared computing infrastructure from physical and virtual resources to deliver broad application environments.
“Industry research firms agree that enterprises will invest more in private cloud services than in external cloud providers through at least 2012,” said Jingwen Wang, vice president products, Platform Computing. “As the market takes off, customers are discovering requirements for building private clouds that virtualisation of servers simply cannot address.”
“Platform ISF, first launched as a beta product in June, is a technology-agnostic platform that supports any collection of hardware, operating systems and virtual machines, enabling IT to manage workload across both virtual and physical environments and support multiple hypervisors and operating systems from a single interface,” Wang said.
The platform offers metered, self-service access across the resource infrastructure, which Platform says enables more effective use of resources. Resource management, along with workload scheduling, are key to a successful private cloud deployment, according to Platform. Private clouds are the best way for IT managers to utilise their infrastructure assets more effectively, while maintaining or improving application service levels.
Business analytics firm SAS has already implemented Platform ISF to create a self-service portal for developers. The firm says that this enables them to provision and deploy compute and application resources.
“We wanted our cloud to include both physical and virtual servers, possibilities not supported by our virtual machine management tools alone,” said Cheryl Doninger, R&D director at SAS. “It was also important that we have robust application programming and management interfaces to simplify and abstract our heterogeneous environment for our private cloud. Platform ISF provides everything we need to flexibly provision all our resources and move between physical and virtual machines when needed.”
