Mirantis intro’s most open OpenStack

The advantage of using OpenStack, particularly if you are a developer of cloud services, is that it is available from a growing number of service providers and vendors.

But even there creeps in the inevitable tendency for services to carry with them a degree of adherence to the specifics of certain technology stacks. The end result, therefore, can still end up with users finding themselves locked in to using a particular service provider or environment, with any change to another service provider requiring a variable degree of re-engineering, even if it is an OpenStack to OpenStack move.

So the appearance of a distribution of OpenStack that claims to be amongst the most technology-agnostic available is bound to be of interest to the service development community, as it gives them one platform to build for which, if then widely taken by service providers, gives a broad spread of availability and portability.

Just such a distribution is now available from Mountain View-based Mirantis. The company claims it gives enterprises the widest selection in choice of supported operating systems, hypervisors and storage back-ends. It integrates core OpenStack components, essential related OpenStack projects and 3rd party plug-ins, in a single, commercially-supported package, and offers the latest innovations from the open source community along with the testing and reliability expected of enterprise software.

“Mirantis came into our office and stood up Mirantis OpenStack for our POC Dev environment in a few hours. After they left I tore everything down and rebuilt our POC over and over with Fuel.”

"We’ve helped scores of Global 2000 customers stand up the largest OpenStack clouds in production and they’ve helped us design the first easy, flexible, and reliable OpenStack distribution designed for enterprises at scale,” said Adrian Ionel, Mirantis CEO. “We have no larger software portfolio agenda. We are focused only on helping our customers succeed with OpenStack. No other distribution of OpenStack offers customers this range of choice or extensibility in their cloud.”

The distribution includes core OpenStack packages that run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS and Ubuntu operating systems, as well having support for three related OpenStack projects – Fuel, Savanna  and the Mirantis-developed Murano, which provides Hadoop on demand on OpenStack with just one click. It also supports Ceph as the back end for object and block storage and offers an early preview of drivers for VMware's vSphere virtualisation platform.

Currently based on the enterprise-tested Grizzly release, Mirantis OpenStack distribution on the Havana release will be available for download after November 11.