Mirantis Extends OpenStack Alliances

Mirantis, a provider of a distribution of OpenStack, last week revealed that it has inked alliances with both Oracle and Pivotal, a unit of EMC.

Under terms of the deal with Oracle, the Oracle database running on Oracle Solaris operating systems can now be provisioned via the OpenStack Murano application catalog project.

The alliance with Pivotal calls for integration of the Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) environment commercially sold by Pivotal and the distribution of OpenStack created by Mirantis. Under the terms of that deal Mirantis has also agreed to resell the Pivotal Cloud Foundry PaaS.

Boris Renski, chief marketing officer for Mirantis, says that while not every customer is trying to implement OpenStack and Cloud Foundry at the same time, most installations of the Cloud Foundry PaaS are dependent on a version of OpenStack being installed.

To that end, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and others have gone to great lengths to package OpenStack and Cloud Foundry together; a move that Mirantis is now able to counter via its relationship with Pivotal.

The alliance with Pivotal comes on the heels of an agreement between Mirantis and EMC to create a reference architecture for deploying OpenStack across server and storage infrastructure.

In general, Renski says that IT organizations that make use of hardened distributions of OpenStack from vendors such as Mirantis are enjoying considerably more OpenStack success than those that choose to download raw open source OpenStack code.

“We have customers that have scaled OpenStack to thousands of physical hosts,” says Renski. “There are a lot of OpenStack configuration issues so if you use the raw bits OpenStack may not scale or even work at all.”

Renski says that OpenStack continues to gain momentum as an alternative to commercial management frameworks that wind up being a lot more expensive to deploy. Most existing IT organizations, however, already have major commitments to platforms such as VMware. Over time it will be interesting to see whether OpenStack simply supplants VMware or if the two frameworks will be deployed in parallel to support different classes of workloads inside the data center.

Nor is it clear just how entrenched VMware is inside the data center. While the VMware hyper visor is widely deployed, there’s never been much consensus surrounding management frameworks inside the data center. Now as IT organizations ponder just how they will make the transition to a new era of software-defined data centers it’s clear that battle of management supremacy inside those next generation data center is only just beginning.