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Dana Gardner

Platform Computing steps up with easy-entry solution for building private clouds

By Dana Gardner | August 27, 2010, 12:19pm PDT

Summary: The $4,995 Starter Pack announcement comes as a slew of vendors are focused on the adoption path for private clouds.

Platform Computing has paved the way to faster private cloud adoption with a low-risk, low-cost way for companies to evaluate their use of cloud computing. The Platform ISF Starter Pack, announced this week, will enable architects and IT managers to get a cloud sandbox environment up and running in less than 30 minutes, the company says.

The $4,995 Starter Pack announcement comes as a slew of vendors are focused on the adoption path for private clouds. More private cloud developments are expected at next week’s VWworld conference.

Platform ISF manages application workloads across multiple virtual machine (VM) technologies and provisioning tools. It includes self-service, automated provisioning and chargeback capabilities. It supports multiple VM technologies, including ESX, Xen, KVM and Hyper-V, as well as popular provisioning tools, such as Red Hat Satellite, IBM xCAT, Symantec Altiris, and Platform Cluster Manager. [Disclosure: Platform Computing is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

“Organizations have plenty of toolkits to choose from as they evaluate private cloud, but they require multiple tools that users must string together themselves,” said James Pang, Vice President Product Management for Platform. “What’s more, these toolkits can cost $50,000 or more, and require 30-plus days of onsite consulting to build and customize an evaluation environment. We wanted to provide a cheap and easy way for users to get up and running quickly with a single product.”

Software and best practices

The ISF Starter Pack, which costs $4,995, includes software, best practices advice and help to set up private cloud and includes:

One-year Platform ISF term license for 10 sockets, including support
Half-day orientation training
Half-day cloud building consultation
Integration advice for Platform ISF with your internal tools

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Topics

Provisioning, Platform Computing Inc., Virtual Machine, Desktop Virtualization, Virtualization, Server Virtualization, Hardware, Servers, Dana Gardner

Dana Gardner is president and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, an enterprise IT analysis, market research, and consulting firm.

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Dana Gardner

Dana Gardner is president and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, LLC, a New Hampshire-based IT analysis and new media content production and consultancy firm that he founded in 2005. He produces a series of podcast/videocast/transcript/blog content shows, called BriefingsDirect[tm/sm], some of which are sponsored and which he blogs on. Such sponsored shows are declared individually as such and by what organization or company. When Dana blogs on ZDNet on companies that he does have, or has had, consulting and/or sponsorship relationships, he declares that in each blog entry. There is no connection between the negotiation of such sponsorships and the opinions expressed by Dana here on ZDNet. To date, the following organizations/companies have sponsored, or do sponsor, some BriefingsDirect content, or have consulting relationships with Dana: Active Endpoints Akamai Technologies Aster Data Systems BP Logix Business Technology Quarterly CA Compuware Electric Cloud Genuitec Gerson Lehrman Group Greenplum Hewlett-Packard iTKO JustSystems North America, Inc. Kapow Technologies LogLogic Nexaweb Technologies, Inc. The Open Group Paglo Panda Security Platform Computing Progress Software rPath Sailpoint Splunk TIBCO Software Weblayers Workday WSO2 ZDNet As a matter of CNET Networks and Interarbor Solutions policies, when Dana covers an organization that is also a sponsor of a BriefingsDirect-produced podcast, videocast or any other content, a disclosure will be included with the coverage. Updated (1/4/2010): Instead of providing a disclosure on just those editorials (blog posts, etc.) that intersect the above listed companies, we have changed the policy to include a link to this full disclosure at the end of every one of Dana's blog posts. In the case of audio or video-based coverage, such disclosures will be provided within the editorial content itself.