One of the primary benefits of an open platform such as OpenStack is its ability to be an integration engine for various cloud technologies. This gives users the flexibility to choose best of breed compute, networks, and storage technologies to build out their private cloud while retaining the benefits of a common management framework for operators and a set of consistent APIs for developers. It is one of the reasons that we at Platform9 decided to build our cloud management as a service solution using the OpenStack project. As a result, we are able to provide managed services for the management layer while allowing users to choose both KVM and vSphere as hypervisors and any number of networking solutions for their private cloud infrastructures.

And this week, we announced general availability of Platform9 Cinder integration to enable customers to leverage the storage subsystem of their choice to provide persistent block storage in their KVM or vSphere powered private cloud. Additionally, we are excited that the first storage partner to be certified with Platform9 is SolidFire, the leading all-flash storage company. Below, you can view a demo of the SolidFire integration with Platform9.

Now that we are making Cinder available with Platform9, customers can use storage from partners, such as SolidFire, and know that Platform9 will take responsibility for deploying, hosting, and managing the OpenStack services required to transform that storage into cloud storage. If you want to learn more, I encourage you to read my full Platform9 blog post; there I address the following questions:

Why use Cinder?

Why use Cinder with an enterprise storage array?

Why did Platform9 choose to work first with SolidFire?