The IT industry has a problem. IT organizations are being left behind, unable to make investments in their existing on-premises infrastructure, grow cost effectively in the cloud, and innovate at the edge. They are saddled with technical debt and locked into expensive cloud services agreements. 

With thousands of free and open source task-specific software packages available, IT organizations should be able to grow cost effectively, deploy at the edge, and lead across their peer groups. But virtually all task-specific software packages, even those that claim to help manage resources, assume that basic infrastructure and infrastructure management is already in place. Foundational infrastructure, including servers, storage and networking hardware, and lower-level software services that apps depend upon, is left to IT organizations to implement on a do-it-yourself (DIY) basis.

Platina helps organizations run their applications anywhere they choose — on-prem, colocation, edge — by eliminating the DIY of managing modern foundational infrastructure more easily and scalably, and with far fewer resources. 

Looking Down the Complexity Barrel

This DIY responsibility is a constantly recurring element as applications and technologies change. Years ago, this came in the form of documentation and scripts, unable to evolve to Infrastructure as Code (IaC) patterns used by DevOps teams today. Cloud operators have gone to great lengths to streamline the effort to provision and manage servers, storage, and networking at scale by homogenizing, automating, simplifying, and eliminating state to expose common APIs and machine-readable data to represent infrastructure. At sub-rack or sub-megawatt deployment scale, these systems simply don’t exist, leaving IT to implement DIY. 

Forward-thinking CXOs and VPs are now looking down the barrel at complex scenarios when considering infrastructure scaling, management, and modernization:

• Managing legacy infrastructure: When you peel back the layers, infrastructure was constructed on an ad hoc, piecemeal basis and managed with spreadsheets and scripts written by a now-retired IT employee. It’s a manual, inefficient infrastructure nightmare.
  

• Initiatives to reach the edge: When implementations require sub-rack or sub-megawatt deployments in locations where cloud service providers have no infrastructure, they leave the challenge to IT. IT now spends time hand-coding foundational infrastructure rather than focusing on business value.

• Strategic cloud repatriation: When bringing certain workloads and applications from the public cloud back to on-premises data centers, enterprise IT departments are no longer able to access the full spectrum of infrastructure services and experts that was provided in the cloud. They are seeking experts to manage the complex intricacies of a modern private cloud or on-premises infrastructure.
  

Why Working with Experts Matters

Years ago, companies that migrated to cloud-based infrastructure were ahead in their industries. But if you haven't done the work to integrate modern improvements and centralized management of the infrastructure, it's likely your backend is a bit of a nightmare. Not to mention, you’re likely overpaying up to triple than what was expected by running your data-heavy workloads in the cloud. Some companies offer overlay management solutions to replicate some functionality of the big cloud providers through additional virtualization, containerization, and orchestration offerings, but at additional cost above and beyond the cloud services themselves. These overlays may seem attractive, but in fact they are an anti-pattern to what the big cloud folks are doing — stripping out complexity and reducing management. DIY IT needs the same.

Platina can help manage the entire IT environment, including servers, networking, and storage (which we call clusters) from hardware to software, within a single private portal. You'll have a team to detect concerns before they become problems, discover unconfigured devices, and report on the work with clear, timely communication. Platina can set up IT infrastructure, known as provisioning, whether it entails new hardware, integrating Kubernetes, adding storage capabilities, or updating to include new releases. Platina can expose ready-to-use resources via API so that developers get a cloud-like experience, even with on-premises or colocated clusters.

How Platina Operates 

Through the centralized Platina Command Center (PCC), we integrate the tools, systems, and resources necessary to maintain and scale your company. We are able to streamline your organization's physical and virtual infrastructure to avoid costly problems and make troubleshooting easier.

Through automation, Platina provide services that can include:

• Bare Metal OS Deployment and Provisioning
• Device Discovery and Inventory
• Automated Networking including IP Address Management
• Software-Defined Storage with Ceph
• Container Orchestration with Kubernetes
• Container Registry
• Credential and Secret Management
• Policy Management and Deployment
• Role Based Access Control (RBAC)
  

DevOps teams can deploy a myriad of open source task-specific applications to meet their goals, all while knowing that the underlying infrastructure is deployed in a scalable, consistent, and repeatable manner. The result is lower costs, ease of management, and a streamlined system that puts an end to the headaches.

DIY Evolved: Cluster Management

Platina enables you to deploy applications anywhere and in any manner that works for your company. Whether you are working with a private cloud, a hybrid deployment, or on the edge, our automated, turn-key structure will allow you to focus on innovation and growing your business for the future. With modern cluster management, servers, storage, and networking are deployed in a scalable, consistent, and repeatable manner. IT is focused on the business, not remediating issues with legacy infrastructure. With Platina, value is driven to the business, not passed through to cloud providers and overlay software vendors. Cluster management is DIY evolved for IaC.