Mirantis Partners with Dell on OpenStack Clouds

Engineering services firm Mirantis this week announced a partnership with Dell to enable customers to design, build and manage enterprise-grade clouds using OpenStack technology. The partnership combines the technology of Dell’s OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution with Mirantis’ engineering expertise in OpenStack to deliver cloud solutions tailored to the needs of Fortune 1000 enterprises, service providers, and SaaS companies.

Mirantis offers expertise in open source application infrastructure and OpenStack. Its clients include Cisco, GE Money Bank, and Agilent. The company currently houses one of the largest groups of experts in OpenStack under a single roof.

The combined effort with Dell aims to increase the speed and quality of application development and delivery as well as reduce data center costs by up to 70 percent and eliminate the vendor lock-in of proprietary software, according to the announcement.

“The 200 Mirantis engineers and their road-tested expertise in OpenStack are a strong addition to the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution partner portfolio,” said Joseph George, director of Product Strategy for Dell Cloud Solutions. “Their knowledge and skills add another dimension to our OpenStack solution, enabling our customers to get to success fast.”

Mirantis will partner with Dell to provide:

"Dell and Mirantis share the commitment to build robust, automated clouds to meet the requirements of the most demanding customers," said Adrian Ionel, CEO, Mirantis.

Mirantis and Dell have already completed a number of customer projects, helping organizations deploy and manage the Dell solution, which advances the adoption of open source IaaS. While Dell provides hardware, software,  services, reference architecture, and deployment guide to enable OpenStack adoption, Mirantis designs specialized, custom solutions to meet unique and complex enterprise needs in cloud computing.

Mirantis has also contributed to the Dell-developed Crowbar software framework, including partnering on key Crowbar barclamps for the latest Essex release of OpenStack. Dell’s Crowbar manages the OpenStack deployment from the initial server boot to the configuration of the primary OpenStack components. This permits users to complete bare metal deployment of multi-node OpenStack clouds in a matter of hours, as opposed to days.

Dell has been a leader in the OpenStack community since its creation, and continues to work closely with a number of key OpenStack partners, including Rackspace, Opscode, Canonical, Intel, and others. Dell is also one of the industry’s most experienced partners to top global cloud services providers, including Facebook and Microsoft Windows Azure.