Canonical and Mirantis Partner On Enterprise OpenStack

Canonical and Mirantis, both OpenStack distribution providers, announced they were partnering to accelerate enterprise adoption of OpenStack, the open source cloud architecture. The two are collaborating on private cloud solutions based on Mirantis OpenStack and Ubuntu GuestOS.

The partnership means investment in continuously testing compatibility between Mirantis OpenStack and Ubuntu to ensure that Mirantis OpenStack distribution works seamlessly with Ubuntu.  The companies said they will collaborate to offer an OpenStack solution that is fully supported, secure and ready for production workloads.

This adds flexibility and security from Mirantis with the Ubuntu operating system, which currently has a sizable share of the totality of OpenStack instances deployed. This partnership allows customers to benefit from having another proven and supported OpenStack cloud solution but also demonstrates how vendors can team up to boost interoperability in the open source ecosystem.

“As the leading provider of scale-out and open cloud solutions we are committed to interoperability and freedom from vendor lock-in”, said John Zannos, vice president of Cloud Alliances at Canonical.  “We support Ubuntu in the Ubuntu OpenStack distribution and, as part of this strategic relationship with Mirantis, will support Ubuntu in Mirantis OpenStack. This collaboration will further encourage adoption of OpenStack in the enterprise, and working together is a testament to our belief in interoperability and customer choice.“

Mirantis will offer enterprise customers a commercial bundle that will include subscription to Mirantis OpenStack with support for Ubuntu host and guest instances. Mirantis and Canonical will integrate support operations to provide a consistent service level agreement and seamless support escalation path for customers.

“As OpenStack adoption moves from proof-of-concept trials and pilots into production, offering support for operating systems becomes critical,” said Boris Renski, co-founder and chief marketing officer at Mirantis. “Ubuntu is the most popular Linux platform used in OpenStack, and we expect this partnership to give Mirantis OpenStack customers additional confidence in production use cases.”

The ARM ecosystem on OpenStack is widening, with many making bets on the low power requirements of ARM architecture and its role in the future data center. This is behind Canonical and Ubuntu also announcing expanded support for the ThunderX SoC Family from Cavium. Ubuntu says it is the first commercial-grade platform for ARM64 computing with optimized integration for the ThunderX SoC Family. Canonical and Applied Micro recently demoed production software on a 64-bit ARM server as well.