Q&A: Mirantis Talks About OpenStack Appliances

Mirantis, the pure-play OpenStack company, recently announced Supermicro and QCT as the latest Certified Rack Partner to offer Mirantis Unlocked Appliances. These turnkey, rack-based appliances ship with Mirantis OpenStack pre-configured to run in production environments and are easy to install, deploy and operate at scale.

I asked Jim Sangster, senior direct of Solutions Marketing at Mirantis, about why customers now seem to be embracing dedicated OpenStack appliances for building clouds instead of running off-the-shelf commodity servers.

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Jim Sangster:  There are a few reasons. First, we are starting to see increased interest in turnkey OpenStack solutions because OpenStack is going more mainstream into the enterprise where low risk, pre-validated solutions are of value to decision makers.  When OpenStack was more on the cutting edge it was primarily early adopters who wanted direct access to upstream trunk.  They wanted to experiment with hardware and software, wanted to directly participate in the community and shunned OpenStack distributions as well as integrated systems.

Second, it is important to have a broad and growing revenue stream as a young company. Some of the startups were very early in the OpenStack ecosystem and only concentrated on integrated systems before customers were ready to buy that way.  Mirantis views integrated systems as part of a larger spectrum of offerings inclusive of the Mirantis OpenStack software distribution. You also need to offer extensive services for architecture and delivery, educational training — plus turnkey Mirantis OpenStack Unlocked Appliances.

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Read the entire Q&A at the source: http://vmblog.com/archive/2016/04/20/vmblog-s-expert-interviews-mirantis-talks-about-openstack-appliances.aspx#.VxfL0Hp5LNc