TORONTO, Jan. 25, 2011 -- Platform Computing, the leading independent cloud management software provider, today announced the general availability of Platform ISF 2.1, a new release of its modular software for building and managing enterprise private clouds.  Platform ISF's unique application-centric approach enables customers to support multi-tier applications in addition to provisioning infrastructure (IaaS) and platform (middleware) as services. Customers benefit with a solution that can support the entire application lifecycle from dev/test to production-ready application clouds in as quickly as 30 days.

Proven by large enterprise adopters over the past year, Platform ISF automates delivery of complex enterprise infrastructure and production applications across heterogeneous virtual, physical and public cloud resources.  By capturing corporate standards and business policies within the automation engine, companies improve both compliance and security.  Platform ISF 2.1 also employs an industry-first, dynamic "single cloud pane" for cloud administrators and delegates; expanded out-of-the-box definitions for multi-tier application environments such as Hadoop, Jboss, Tomcat and WebSphere; and enhanced business policy driven automation for both green energy and high availability across multiple data centers.  A free 30-day trial of Platform ISF 2.1 can be downloaded at www.platform.com/privatecloud.

Quotes

    * "Enterprises looking to take advantage of the cloud do so for many reasons but one of the key ones is to enhance their agility in response to changing business dynamics," said Cameron Haight, Research Vice President, Gartner, Inc.  "This means that the technology used to manage cloud environments should be similarly agile and act to facilitate and not impede this industry movement.  IT organizations should look for tools that can address the various cloud usage scenarios without demanding excessive investments in management infrastructure or staff support."

    * "Today's enterprise data center is facing tremendous pressure to both innovate with new cloud architectures while operating legacy applications and heterogeneous systems.  With that reality, adopting an open cloud management solution that supports flexibility and choice is critical," said Jay Muelhoefer, VP Enterprise Marketing, Platform Computing. "Platform ISF is the best alternative to vertically integrated big vendor stacks or virtualization silos.  As an open, end-to-end solution, Platform ISF allows companies to benefit from the cloud, not stitch it together across multiple vendors like a systems integrator."

Key Points

    * Large enterprises continue to recognize the need for a private cloud to meet regulatory, security and performance requirements.  In order to achieve agility and cost objectives, enterprises are taking a page from Google and Amazon using a new cloud data center stack to transform internal IT. 

    * The new cloud data center requires more than just virtualization and traditional IT practices.  Cloud management is a layer purpose-built for cloud infrastructure and processes that co-exists with legacy and bridges to the future.  Key capabilities include:  self-service and chargeback, policy-based automated provisioning of applications, dynamic scaling of applications to meet SLAs and unification of distributed and mixed-vendor resource pools for sharing.

    * Enterprises are currently demanding three additional capabilities from private cloud management:

          o No vendor lock-in: Large IT vendors are increasingly pushing vertically integrated stacks that try to retrofit old approaches into a "cloud mold" that only supports silo resource and bolt-on administration offerings. 

          o A complete product: A streamlined user experience from a single vendor instead of stitching together disparate offerings or multiple complex tools. 

          o A path to production applications: Enterprises recognize that IaaS offers tremendous benefits for dev / test but that clouds also need to support applications.  Cloud management systems must deliver fully operational multi-tier application environments, or application clouds.

Platform ISF 2.1 Features

    * Ease of use

          o Industry first "single cloud pane" for IT administrators that unifies operational management and enables efficient consolidation of SLAs across applications into one view that encompasses both virtual and physical realms.

          o Enhanced end-user portals, including drag-and-drop portlet-based dashboards, customizable application instantiation pages and logos and summary graphs.

          o Unique, self-service hierarchical account and resource management (including Active Directory for 10,000+ users) supporting an unlimited number of organizational tiers.

          o Internationalization, including Chinese language support.

    * Resource management

          o Deeper VMWare integration with support for self-service creation of resource pools, DRS, snapshotting, linked clones, VLANs, vDisks, dynamic growth and adjustment of virtual machine sizes and multiple Virtual Centers.

          o Unique "Active-Active" multiple data center support for higher availability and scalability leveraging Oracle GoldenGate.

          o Enhanced external cloud bursting to Amazon EC2, including VPC.

    * Application-centric

          o Out-of-the-box application catalog including Hadoop, Jboss, Tomcat, WebSphere and Platform LSF.

          o Application lifecycle enhancements including versioning, cloning, reservation attribute modifications and support for application specific logs.

Resources

    * Platform ISF 2.1 is available now.  A free 30 day trial is available at www.platform.com/privatecloud.

    * Platform Computing is hosting a webinar, "The Journey to the Private Cloud – Ensure Your Success" on February 16th.  For more information about Platform ISF or the webinar, please visit www.platform.com/privatecloud. 

About Platform Computing

Platform Computing is the leader in cluster, grid and cloud management software -- serving more than 2,000 of the world's most demanding organizations. For 18 years, our workload and resource management solutions have delivered IT responsiveness and lower costs for enterprise and HPC applications. Platform has strategic relationships with Cray, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat, and SAS. Visit www.platform.com.

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Source: Platform Computing