Mirantis links up with Juniper over Contrail SDN to scale up OpenStack clouds

Collaboration between Mirantis and Juniper over open-source Contrail software-defined networking technology provides an alternative way of scaling OpenStack clouds.

By Toby Wolpe | March 19, 2015 -- 10:59 GMT (03:59 PDT) | Topic: Cloud

Mirantis and Google ease Kubernetes Docker cluster manager onto OpenStack

Uptake of Docker containers stands to get a further boost from integration work to put Google's Kubernetes on OpenStack, according to Mirantis.

Mirantis says the integration of Juniper's Contrail software-defined networking technology into its OpenStack distribution will give firms a less expensive, open-source fabric for scaling clouds.

As well as announcing an expanded engineering partnership, Juniper and Mirantis today published a reference architecture for deploying and managing Juniper Contrail Networking with Mirantis OpenStack.

Mirantis said the aim is to make it easier for businesses to "scale OpenStack clouds without relying on complex, expensive, and vendor-proprietary networking and management software".

The integration also provides companies with an alternative to the proprietary VMware vCenter-managed NSX virtual networking software, for which Mirantis released a reference architecture in December.

Mirantis chief architect Jason Venner said in a statement that the integration of Juniper's software-defined networking technology will lead to better datacenter performance, automation, and scalability.

"Plus, its open-source and proven open-standard protocols offer customers future-proofing and investment protection in how they architect their cloud," he said.

The reference architecture is validated for Mirantis OpenStack 6.0, which is based on OpenStack Juno, with Juniper Contrail Networking. The OpenStack specialist and the networking firm also aim to release a plugin for the Fuel open-source tool in the second quarter to simplify the deployment and management of large-scale OpenStack clouds.

Mirantis said OpenStack also supports and interoperates with the OpenContrail open-source software-defined networking platform.

The OpenStack open-source project started in 2010, instigated by Rackspace and NASA. Their goal was to create components for building public and private clouds on standard hardware.

It is now backed by more than 200 vendors, including Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Mirantis, Oracle, Red Hat, and VMware, with a large developer community working on a range of loosely-coupled projects.