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Mirantis, an OpenStack systems integrator, announced that Ericsson, Red Hat and SAP Ventures, along with existing investor WestSummit Capital, have invested $10 million in the second round of Series A financing for Mirantis since December.
This investment brings the total capital raised by the company to $20 million. Mirantis previously raised $10 million in December 2012 from Dell Ventures, Intel Capital and WestSummit Capital.
OpenStack, an open-source cloud computing project to provide infrastructure as a service (IaaS), is quickly gaining momentum among enterprise IT customers. Mirantis offers software and services for customers to deploy and run production-grade OpenStack clouds.
Mirantis officials said proceeds from this round of investment will be used to enhance the company’s position in the OpenStack market by accelerating the engineering roadmap for Fuel, its tool for managing and deploying OpenStack clouds, and driving integration with technology and products from Mirantis’ partners.
“The investment by Ericsson, Red Hat, and SAP Ventures is about more than capital,” said Adrian Ionel, Mirantis president and CEO, in a statement. “It’s about the integration of Mirantis’ Fuel technology and services with key players in IT.”
In addition to the June 6 funding announcement, Mirantis announced a major update to Fuel, which is available for download from the Mirantis Website. The new version offers a visual, intuitive interface as a single control plane for OpenStack clusters and enables automated hardware discovery and network verification. It also supports the latest Grizzly OpenStack release.
To date, Mirantis’ Fuel tools have been free and are open source under the Apache 2.0 license. Later this year, the company plans to release Fuel Enterprise, a commercial-grade distribution of Fuel that will be available exclusively to Mirantis’ subscription customers.
“Because Fuel is open source and easy to modify, experienced cloud operators can get maximum flexibility in their OpenStack deployment,” said Roman Alekseenkov, Mirantis’ director of product and community, in a statement. “With this latest update and Fuel Enterprise, we aim to complement this flexibility with ease-of-use for the daily operation of OpenStack clouds.”
Ericsson will use OpenStack to move systems and applications to an open cloud platform.
“OpenStack is key to our technology roadmap,” said Paolo Colella, vice president and head of consulting and systems integration at Ericsson, in a statement. “Like Mirantis, we are focused on building very robust, mission-critical solutions that meet service provider needs. Mirantis offers the ideal combination of technology, engineering talent, and competence to help us accelerate our OpenStack development.”
Red Hat, which is the largest contributor to OpenStack, is readying its enterprise-class Red Hat OpenStack distribution.
Red Hat, SAP, Ericsson Invest $10M in Mirantis for OpenStack Push
“Red Hat is taking a leadership role in bringing OpenStack to enterprise users, and Mirantis has been an early leader in developing services and tools that are helping enterprise customers achieve success with OpenStack,” said Brian Stevens, Red Hat CTO and vice president of worldwide engineering, in a statement. “Our investment in Mirantis reflects our commitment to customer success and customer choice, and the on-going collaboration between Red Hat and Mirantis will help accelerate the adoption of OpenStack in the enterprise.”
Mirantis has already built an OpenStack cloud for SAP using Fuel, and the companies will explore further use of OpenStack by SAP. “An early leader in promoting and supporting the adoption of OpenStack, Mirantis is poised for continued growth as it aims to help companies around the world build open cloud platforms on an agile, future-proof infrastructure,” said Jai Das, managing director at SAP Ventures, in a statement. “SAP Ventures looks forward to continuing its long-standing support of companies based on open-source technologies and is pleased to support Mirantis’ growth and expansion as it is the clear leader in the OpenStack tools and services market.”
Mirantis announced Fuel in March, opening up its private library of configuration and deployment tools for OpenStack to the public. The library had already been used in many OpenStack projects that the company completed for customers such as PayPal, WebEx, NASA and others.
“Mirantis’ Fuel library has been instrumental in accelerating our efforts to stand up highly available, production-grade OpenStack infrastructure,” said Saran Mandair, senior director of platform engineering and operations at PayPal, at the time of the Mirantis Fuel launch in March. “The Mirantis-PayPal collaboration was excellent because it will help promote the open source ecosystem.”
Fuel consists of verified deployment scripts for implementing a variety of OpenStack deployment configurations; these range from simple configurations for proof-of-concept and dev/test scenarios to highly available configurations for production use cases.
“Companies building OpenStack clouds want to keep their infrastructure open and stay in control of its roadmap,” said Boris Renski, Mirantis co-founder and OpenStack Foundation board member. “Fuel is the ultimate do-it-yourself toolkit for OpenStack that emerged as a means to meet those exact needs. We worked with many vendors in building Fuel and specifically designed it to be completely vendor-agnostic.”