CLOUD

Global Beta Launched - General Availability Planned for the Fall

Platform Computing today announced a new software product for managing private cloud environments from the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) Conference in New York City. Platform ISF is the first end-to-end cloud management product for enterprises to build and run their private clouds. It is the centerpiece of Platform’s cloud strategy and will be made available for beta in June with general availability planned for the Fall.

As the longtime leader in grid and HPC management software, Platform Computing is expanding its product offerings to support the needs of mainstream business applications, leveraging its strong technology and experience in deploying large-scale shared compute environments. Platform ISF is computing infrastructure sharing software for private cloud management. Private clouds generally refer to resources pooled together in a shared IT infrastructure to run applications for business users. Platform ISF creates private clouds from physical and virtual resources, delivering application environments according to workload and resource scheduling policies. It incorporates Platform’s production-proven resource sharing technology (EGO) and virtual machine orchestrator (VMO) and includes capabilities for self-service, service-offering definition, contracts, reporting and billing. Private clouds deployed through Platform ISF allow IT departments to be more responsive to the needs of the enterprise by offering IT as services on a pay-per-use basis. This new computing paradigm is expected to drastically reduce the costs of IT as resource utilization levels increase due to resource sharing.

“Our vision for this product and for private clouds is based on 17 years of production experience in delivering IT infrastructure sharing software to industry, education and government,” said Songnian Zhou, CEO, Platform Computing. “Platform ISF enables applications to run on shared infrastructure driving higher server utilization and ROI across clusters, grids and clouds.  Using Platform ISF, businesses can deploy and run applications faster, cheaper and more flexibly. Platform is well suited to deliver private cloud solutions as we have extensive experience in deploying large-scale shared compute environments that leverage both physical and virtual resources.”

Platform ISF is a technology-agnostic platform that supports any collection of hardware, operating systems and virtual machines. It also supports third-party system management tools for security and provisioning. This allows organizations to leverage existing resources while conforming to corporate standards. It does so while supporting IT’s obligation to oversee corporate requirements, including governance, compliance, business continuity, and cost and risk management.  While public clouds can offer infrastructure and computer resources on a pay-per-use basis, most of the benefits of cloud computing are not realized by enterprises through the use of public clouds alone. Private clouds can leverage both internal and public cloud resources. Platform ISF acts as the management layer for pulling resources into a unified environment and its value is independent of location or ownership of resources.

This need for enterprises to get started with private cloud and evolve to hybrid has been supported by recent research from Gartner, Inc. “Appropriate investments in private cloud computing will make it easier for enterprises to gradually use public cloud services as needed, if and when the services mature,” said Tom Bittman, VP, Distinguished Analyst, Gartner, Inc. “Because public cloud computing is years from fulfilling many enterprise needs, it is likely that IT organizations will spend more money through 2012 on private cloud computing investments than on offerings from public cloud providers.” 

“We are encouraged by potential cost savings and rapid availability of computing resources through Platform ISF,” said Keith Collins, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of SAS Institute, the leader in business analytics software and services, and partner of Platform Computing. “Because SAS has a well-defined and aggressive strategy for cloud computing, we are eager to evaluate an early release of the software and consider how our internal operations, as well as our customers, can benefit from this promising technology.”

Platform will be exhibiting at SIFMA June 23-25. To view a demonstration of Platform ISF and learn more about Platform’s solutions for the financial services sector, please visit booth #2411. Also see www.sifma.org/events/2009/315/index.html. Concurrently, Platform will be exhibiting at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC ‘09) in booth #440. Visit www.supercomp.de/isc09/.