Canada's Platform Computing, which many people might associate with its old-line job scheduling product, Load Sharing Facility (LSF), got into the cloud business like everybody else a year ago with Platform ISF, a piece of software that lets organizations set up and manage private clouds, control both physical and virtual resources, and support a variety of hardware and OS configurations.

Now it's got a $4,995 U.S.-only end-to-end Platform ISF Starter Pack that's supposed to be a low-risk, low-cost way for companies to evaluate a private cloud.

Architects and IT managers are supposed to be able to get a cloud sandbox environment up and running in less than 30 minutes.

The deal includes a one-year Platform ISF license for 10 sockets plus a bit of consulting, training and support.

The company says other people's evaluations require multiple tools that users must string together themselves, cost $50,000 or more, and require 30 days or more of onsite consulting to build and customize an evaluation environment.

Platform ISF manages application workloads across multiple VM technologies like ESX, Xen, KVM and Hyper-V and provisioning systems like Red Hat Satellite, IBM xCAT, Symantec Altiris and Platform Cluster Manager. It includes self-service, automated provisioning and chargeback capabilities.