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In a move that could shake up the nascent OpenStack cloud market, Oracle has partnered with Mirantis for OpenStack cloud technology.
The partnership will bring commercial support for Mirantis OpenStack customers that want to deploy clouds with Oracle Linux and Oracle VM technologies. The partnership does not currently extend to certify Mirantis OpenStack to run on Oracle hardware.
“It is hard to quantify exactly, but I believe that the near-term opportunity for both organizations around this partnership is in the tens of millions in the next 24 months,” Boris Renski, co-founder of Mirantis, told eWEEK.
Mirantis is one of the top 10 contributors to the open-source OpenStack cloud project. It has its own OpenStack distribution, which was updated in June to version 5.0.
Oracle and Mirantis have already spent some time aligning their respective sales forces on customer opportunities and are now planning additional joint go-to-market activities, Renski said. Oracle and Mirantis are also hosting a joint live Webcast later this calendar quarter featuring a live demo of the integration work that the two vendors have jointly worked on.
In terms of support for customers, Renski said that Mirantis will be the single point of contact for customers on all level one and level two issues related to Oracle Linux, Oracle VM, OpenStack and guest virtual machines. Oracle will support Mirantis on level three issues with Oracle Linux and Oracle VM.
“We are establishing a seamless mechanism for escalating support issues between organizations,” he said.
At the operating system level, the Mirantis OpenStack distribution leverages the CentOS Linux operating system, which is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Oracle Linux is also based on RHEL, though that doesn’t mean there wasn’t some effort required by Mirantis to get everything to work as it should.
“The thing is that no Linux distribution out of the box is optimal to serve as an OpenStack host,” Renski said. “For OpenStack to run optimally, you always need to install a few additional packages and update others versus those that come with a stock distro.”
Mirantis worked with the Oracle team to examine the list of specific packages that need to be installed on stock Oracle Linux to optimize it for OpenStack without invalidating Oracle support, Renski said.
Oracle only recently embraced OpenStack for its own platforms. On May 13, the company announced that it would be supporting the OpenStack platform on Oracle Linux. That announcement followed one at the end of April bringing OpenStack support to Oracle’s Solaris Unix operating system.
The Mirantis partnership currently only extends to Oracle Linux and not Solaris.
“We do have an ongoing and parallel track with the Oracle Solaris team, but are not ready to announce anything on that front quite yet,” Renski said.
Oracle VM isn’t the only virtualization engine that Mirantis will support. The company also supports VMware’s hypervisor technologies as well as the open-source KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) hypervisor.
“The idea is that strategic partnerships that we establish with key infrastructure vendors ultimately enable our customers to easily control the VMware, KVM, Oracle VM mix in their infrastructure portfolio via a single fabric, that is Mirantis OpenStack,” Renski said.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.