Mirantis
Vitalizing OpenStack Distribution and Deployment

Organizations migrating to the cloud seek to leverage open source platforms due to their cost-effectiveness, customizability, and interoperability; this has contributed to OpenStack’s popularity in building and managing cloud platforms. However, OpenStack’s complex architecture and the Do-It-Yourself approach underwhelm organizations while working with the source code. This can be countered by using an OpenStack distribution that simplifies the deployment. As one of the biggest contributors to the OpenStack project, Mirantis provides a distribution that empowers customers to unleash the power of open source innovation sans vendor intervention. The company operates on a Build-Operate-Transfer model to deliver OpenStack distribution and cloud management services to help enterprises build and manage private cloud infrastructure using OpenStack.

As a pure-play company, Mirantis offers a fully interoperable and flexible OpenStack distribution with myriad end-points for computing, storage, and networking. It consists of Core OpenStack services packed into a High Availability (HA) architecture, manageable with native OpenStack tools. Mirantis OpenStack provides a robust set of OpenStack control-plane services, unlike other distributions where integrations with hypervisors, operating systems, storage, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) or Cloud Management Platform (CMP) are often limited. Further, Mirantis validates fully configured servers and their peripheral components with specific releases of its OpenStack for building best-in-class infrastructure. The company even supports customers with improved control over their OpenStack environment by integrating its distribution with Fuel, the OpenStack management software, which simplifies the deployment of various other OpenStack distributions and third party plug-ins, into Mirantis OpenStack and StackLight—the tool built specifically for logging, monitoring, and alerting OpenStack operations. “The only way for the industry to have an answer to challenge the public cloud offering is to have a platform that works as well,” says Alex Freedland, CEO and Co-founder, Mirantis.

The only way for the industry to have an answer to challenge the public cloud offering is to have a platform that works as well

Mirantis has assisted over 200 clients to build and operate some of the largest OpenStack clouds in the world. Some of the big names in its illustrious clientele include AT&T, Comcast, eBay, Wells Fargo Bank, and Volkswagen. In the case of Volkswagen Group, the company’s growth had resulted in a decentralized and heterogeneous IT environment, resulting in higher IT infrastructure costs. The infrastructure team had to unify and automate workstreams and platforms on a global scale to handle the huge number of customer queries. When it was decided to move to the cloud, public cloud models proved prohibitively expensive. Having evaluated numerous providers of OpenStack distributions, Volkswagen chose Mirantis which had a success rate of 98 percent in OpenStack deployments. With the implementation of Mirantis OpenStack, time to provision new platforms for handling the additional workload reduced from months to minutes.

The success story of Volkswagen is just one among the many feathers in Mirantis’ cap. The company continues to scale new heights in the OpenStack arena. Recently, Mirantis partnered with Harmonic, a global leader in video delivery infrastructure, to make video content production and delivery simple, agile, and efficient. The company has also teamed up with Juniper to support the latter’s OpenContrail—an open-source network virtualization platform for the cloud—with Mirantis OpenStack. With several exciting ventures on its plate, Mirantis is poised to scale greater heights.