Responding to the cloud management requirements beyond what server virtualization can offer, Platform ISF creates a shared computing infrastructure from physical and virtual heterogeneous resources to deliver broad application environments with efficient workload-smart and resource-aware policy capabilities.

"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 virtualization 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."

Data center IT managers are seeking better ways to utilize their infrastructure assets more effectively, while maintaining or improving application service levels. Private clouds are the solution, but they require the combination of workload scheduling and resource management similar to cluster and grid computing environments. Leveraging Platform Computing's cluster and grid expertise, Platform ISF addresses the private cloud management challenge enabling IT to achieve more effective use of their resources through metered, self-service access across their entire heterogeneous resource infrastructure.

"By turning portions of our clients' corporate data centers into private clouds, we're enabling companies to realize the next wave of consolidation with associated capital and operating cost savings," said Joe Szalkiewicz, Vice President, Pinnacle Business Solutions, a division of The Pinnacle Group. "Platform ISF provides enterprise scalability through an independent management layer for operating systems and virtual machine provisioning tools."

SAS, the leader in business analytics, has deployed Platform ISF internally to create a self-service portal for developers, allowing them to quickly and reliably 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 Cary, NC-based 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."

According to Forrester principal analyst James Staten, as printed in The Industry Standard in the June 2009 article titled "Platform Computing tackles tech-agnostic cloud management", "Platform ISF meets all the requirements needed in a cloud management product: a workload distribution engine; an infrastructure aggregation layer; a self-service portal for IT administrators; metering and monitoring; and robust APIs for integration with third-party tools. We believe [Platform ISF] is perhaps the most complete internal cloud software solution we've seen so far."