Simplifying OpenStack Clouds with turnkey appliances

“About 20 percent of infrastructure is consumed through the appliance form factor because it is extremely easy to set up and operate,” said Alex Freedland, Mirantis president and co-founder. “Mirantis Unlocked Appliances combines this ease of use with the openness and flexibility of OpenStack, delivered as a cloud-in-a-box. Our first appliance focuses on the most common OpenStack use case - developing cloud-native applications - and will be built and shipped by Certified Rack Partners across the ecosystem.”

Through the Unlocked Appliance program, Mirantis collaborates with Unlocked Technology Partners, including hardware and software vendors, to design and pre-validate an architecture configuration that leverages Mirantis OpenStack, the most popular and hardened OpenStack distribution on the market. Rack Partners then build, deliver and certify appliances for customers. Redapt, Inc., a cloud-focused systems integrator based in Redmond, Washington, is the first Certified Rack Partner to deliver Mirantis’ inaugural appliance, Mirantis Unlocked Appliance for Cloud Native Applications. In addition to building and certifying the appliance, Redapt pre-validated the reference architecture in an engineering collaboration with Mirantis.

“Redapt is excited to be the first Certified Rack Partner, which enables us to deliver what our customers have been requesting for years: the flexibility and zero lock-in of OpenStack in a turnkey solution,” said Josh Lindenbaum, Vice President of Business & Corporate Development, Redapt. “The architecture Redapt designed with Mirantis, with Mirantis OpenStack at the core, solves for the complexity commonly associated with OpenStack. Redapt will work closely with customers to assemble, deliver and install Mirantis Unlocked Appliances that will arrive in the data center ready to plug and play.”

Mirantis Unlocked Appliance for Cloud Native Applications speeds development and production deployments of cloud-native applications at scale. The first iteration is powered by Dell and Juniper Networks, enabling agile development of cloud native applications and production deployments of container-based services. The well-balanced architecture offers both flexibility and scalability, with configurations ranging from six compute nodes and 12 TBs of usable storage, to a full rack comprised of 24 compute nodes and 24 TBs of usable storage, and a maximum of two racks sustaining over 1500 virtual machines and 48 TBs of usable storage. Compute and foundation nodes are based on performance optimized Dell® PowerEdge® R630 servers. Storage nodes are based on Dell PowerEdge R730xd with dual Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 CPUs and Intel® SSD-based cache optimized for high-performance storage. Mirantis OpenStack 6.1 provides the infrastructure foundation, and each rack includes two Juniper QFX5100s as the data path and one Juniper EX3300 for management.