Canonical and Mirantis Team Up on Enterprise OpenStack Support

Mirantis and Canonical today announced a joint collaboration to offer private cloud solutions based on Mirantis OpenStack and Ubuntu. The two companies plan to invest in continuously testing compatibility between Mirantis OpenStack and Ubuntu to ensure that the Mirantis OpenStack distribution works seamlessly with Ubuntu.  The companies will also collaborate to offer an OpenStack solution that is fully supported. 

The upshot of today's news is that this collaboration will allow the two partners to compete much more directly with Red Hat, which has its own OpenStack distribution and an array of support, training and compatibility offerings surrounding it.

“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 VP of Cloud Alliances at Canonical, in a statement. “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.“

While not everyone realizes it, Ubuntu is the platform that many OpenStack deployments are already built on.  According to the most recent OpenStack Foundation global survey, Ubuntu is the most popular host and guest operating system for OpenStack, with 55% of all OpenStack instances running on Ubuntu.

“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 CMO at Mirantis, in a statement. “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.”

For Canonical, this partnership can help it get even more of a foothold in enterprises, many of which are deploying OpenStack. Under terms of the deal, 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 under a consistent service level agreement, with support escalation paths that sound similar to the ones that Red Hat has in place.

Canonical is hedging its bets, though. As The Var Guy notes: "Canonical will also continue supporting the separate Ubuntu OpenStack distribution that it already offers."