Mirantis Forges Closer Ties with SUSE to Promote OpenStack

Mirantis wants to become the "one-stop shop" for users of OpenStack on enterprise Linux. The company this week announced a new partnership with SUSE, adding another Linux option alongside its existing Red Hat and CentOS offerings.

Mirantis is a major distributor of OpenStack, the open source platform for building cloud infrastructure on top of a Linux-based operating system. Mirantis seeks to distinguish itself in the crowded OpenStack market by delivering what it calls a "pure-play" OpenStack distribution, allowing users to deploy any type of Linux platform in conjunction with OpenStack.

While Mirantis can support any Linux distribution, it has now forged closer ties with SUSE, which develops SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. On Tuesday, the companies announced a partnership that aims "to optimize SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for Mirantis OpenStack," according to a statement from Mirantis.

The companies say they will contribute the code they develop as part of their collaboration back to the main OpenStack project, making the enhancements available to the broader open source cloud community.

One-stop OpenStack shopping (minus modern Ubuntu?)

Mirantis's strategy is to allow companies that use multiple Linux distributions in their cloud-enabled datacenters to choose a single OpenStack distribution for use on all of those platforms.

"Many of our larger customers run two or three different Linux flavors," Mirantis CMO Boris Renski said. "Now OpenStack users can get support for their major Linux distributions in one place from Mirantis."

Mirantis OpenStack is not the only OpenStack distribution that can run on top of more than one type of Linux platform. Since OpenStack and Linux are both open source technologies, it's easy enough for users to modify the platforms in order to make virtually any type of OpenStack-Linux pairing work.

Still, Mirantis's focus on flexibility could help it to appeal in the open source cloud market, where many other OpenStack distributions are tied to particular Linux distributions.

The SUSE partnership may also be an attempt by Mirantis to forge a close partnership with another enterprise Linux vendor in the place of Canonical, the company that develops Ubuntu Linux. Canonical and Mirantis previously collaborated closely, and Ubuntu remains a popular platform for running Mirantis, but the most recent version of Ubuntu, 16.04, is not validated for Mirantis OpenStack. Only Ubuntu 14.04 and earlier versions are supported.