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Mirantis offers Icehouse-based OpenStack 5.0

Mirantis' OpenStack 5.0 is designed to play well in VMware vCenter environments.
Written by Dan Kusnetzky, Contributor

Mirantis announced version 5.0 of its OpenStack distribution. This version is based upon OpenStack Icehouse and is designed to play well in VMware vCenter environments. I've spoken with company executives from time to time and have always come away impressed with their understanding of the market and OpenStack technology.

What Mirantis has to say about Mirantis OpenStack 5.0

Here are a few snippets from Mirantis' comments on OpenStack 5.0

Support for interoperability with VMware vCenter Server is a key new benefit of Mirantis OpenStack 5.0. Now customers using VMware vCenter Server environments can deploy and control workloads that run directly on VMware vSphere in their VMware vCenter Server clusters directly from Mirantis OpenStack, as an alternative to KVM. In this way, VMware resources are made available transparently within the pool of compute resources assigned through the OpenStack Horizon console.

The result is a powerful, easy-to-manage datacenter solution, allowing datacenter and cloud operators to take advantage of OpenStack innovation while helping to maximize previous investments in existing VMware infrastructure. Mirantis OpenStack subscribers are covered 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, with Mirantis technical support providing full support for OpenStack components, and helping customers work with their VMware technical support team regarding VMware technologies.

Fuel, the open source control plane included in Mirantis OpenStack 5.0, now includes two essential new capabilities for forward upgrade compatibility. Popular with OpenStack operators for its robust automation and ease of use, Fuel will now let customers manage clusters and run any future releases of OpenStack (typically made available every 6 to 8 weeks) alongside their existing Icehouse-based clouds. In addition, the Fuel master node, which controls deployment automation, is now packaged using Docker containers. This makes it possible for cloud and datacenter operators to upgrade their Fuel master node — the server that controls the automation — in place, without rebuilding or incurring cloud downtime in their deployed environments. In addition to its upgrade and integration features, Mirantis OpenStack 5.0 includes:

  • The Murano application catalog, an OpenStack project in Stackforge that provides vending-machine style deployment of application workloads, combining PaaS and IaaS functionality within a single console
  • Point-and-click deployment of Sahara, the project that provides elastic deployment of Hadoop projects on an OpenStack cluster
  • Improved scalability for Ceilometer, the OpenStack monitoring and billing project, providing a highly scalable data store for its telemetry data in a MongoDB repository

Analysis

Mirantis is a pure-play OpenStack company that delivers technology, integration, training, and support. The company has a deep and broad understanding of OpenStack, customer requirements and how to help customers simply and easily implement on-premise and off-premise clouds as well as dedicated and shared cloud environments. Unfortunately, the company's deep expertise and strong capabilities haven't generated the type of industry mindshare it would like.

While well known in the OpenStack community, Mirantis is not as well known outside of the community. It is in competition for industry attention with other suppliers of OpenStack distributions, including companies such as Canonical, HP, IBM, RackSpace, Red Hat, and SuSE.

Although many of these suppliers have turned to Mirantis for help when implementing OpenStack-based clouds for their customers, they have not brought Mirantis to the forefront when talking about their OpenStack-based projects. Many of these competitors have "deep pockets" and can out-spend Mirantis. So, Mirantis has focused on its agility, vendor neutrality, and exceptional expertise to win business.

The company has done quite a bit to make installation and use of OpenStack straight-forward in all types of environments. It has gone to great efforts to add tools simplifying integration and use of Hadoop, a selection of virtual machine software, and a selection of operating systems.

If your organization is considering OpenStack as the foundation for your on- and off-premise clouds, getting to know Mirantis is a must.

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