Mirantis Out With Latest OpenStack Distribution

Mirantis, which helps companies stand up OpenStack clouds of their own, has launched the latest release of its distribution of the popular open source cloud architecture.

Mirantis OpenStack 6.0 is based on OpenStack Juno, the most recent release of the open source software package. Juno came out in October 2014.

This is the first OpenStack distribution companies can write their own plug-ins for that can be installed and deployed automatically. Lots of vendors want to be part of the rapidly growing OpenStack ecosystem and want customers to use their products as part of their OpenStack clouds.

That means they have to make their products, storage and networking hardware and management software, for example, compatible with OpenStack. The chief way of doing that has been to contribute plug-ins for different pieces of technology to the open source project.

This is partly why a great number of vendors have been involved with the OpenStack project, and why there have been very frequent release of the software package. Juno was the tenth major release, four years after the first Austin release came out. Kilo, the next release, is due in April.

Not everybody thinks the flurry of IT vendor plug-ins for OpenStack indicates something positive. Jim Morrisroe, CEO of Piston Cloud Computing, a Mirantis competitor, told us in November that he thought the rush to add OpenStack support for traditional IT hardware was pulling the project away from its ultimate goal.

That goal, in Morrisroe’s opinion, is to enable OpenStack clouds on low-cost commodity hardware, and not on expensive proprietary boxes the so-called incumbent IT vendors sell.

The vendors themselves, obviously, beg to differ. Bill Hilf, who leads cloud product strategy at HP, told us it was important to make OpenStack compatible with as many different types of technology from different generations as possible, since most IT environments are mixed bags of legacy and non-legacy gear.

The latest Mirantis OpenStack distribution gives companies the ability to write plug-ins for the Fuel deployment manager, a component of OpenStack. Fuel is an open source framework for creating deployment plug-ins.

Another major addition in the sixth release is extended support for VMware. It has a reference architecture for VMware vCenter Server and VMware NSX. It also supports vSphere DataStore. The Nova-Network VLAN Manager supports VMware’s vCenter.

“Our investment in pluggable architecture makes it much easier for customers to take advantage of their preferred networking and storage solutions in building, deploying, and managing their OpenStack clouds,” Boris Renski, Mirantis chief marketing officer, said in a statement.