Mirantis OpenStack 6.0 Released in Technical Preview, Offering New OpenStack Juno Features

logo-WHIR

This article originally appeared at The WHIR

Mirantis has released the Technical Preview of Mirantis OpenStack 6.0, an OpenStack distribution that includes the latest features included in OpenStack Juno, which is, itself, only a few days old.

According to a Wednesday announcement from Mirantis, its latest distribution includes the advanced network functions virtualization and big data features from Juno.

The Preview will offer a peek at the new distribution, and provide Mirantis with feedback. The Preview cannot be used in production, there is no upgrade or update path to or from earlier and later releases, and there is no technical support around issues specific to the Preview.

With its latest version, however, Mirantis OpenStack will continues to provide an out-of-the-box distribution for developers and operators who want to get started with OpenStack, and without the vendor lock-in sometimes associated with other distributions, according to Mirantis.

Mirantis OpenStack features native support for Apache Hadoop, which is being widely used in the processing of Big Data, with the Sahara project allowing users to easily provision Hadoop clusters.

This latest release also features improvements around NFV. For instance, OpenStack deployment and management tool Fuel uses Modular Layer 2 plugins (allowing OpenStack Networking to utilize a variety of layer 2 networking technologies) which essentially streamlines support for new Layer 2 networking technologies. ML2 plug-in packages can be developed without modifying the Fuel core, which simplifies development new components for Fuel by 3d parties and allows plug-ins to be interchanged more easily.

“Mirantis makes OpenStack simple,” Charlie O’Leary said in a statement. O’Leary is a DevOps engineer at Pixafy, a web development and software company that specializes in Magento e-commerce, and that has used Mirantis OpenStack as the basis for a cluster capable of supporting at least 1,000 virtual machines. “Fuel, combined with Mirantis’ 24×7 support, is phenomenal. It gives us a great high-level view of our environment in one place, and the way it manages our overall infrastructure makes things easier on our team.”

Mirantis, however, isn’t alone in its adoption of Juno features. Last week, HP, the largest overall contributor to Juno, launched its OpenStack-based commercial cloud platform, HP Helion with updates to include Juno.

Mirantis has around 100 engineers working on upstream contributions to OpenStack, and, having recently received significant financial backing, has announced plans to double its contributions in 2015, with a focus on ease of use and operation.

This article originally appeared at: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/mirantis-openstack-6-0-released-technical-preview-offering-new-openstack-juno-features