Mirantis, the largest OpenStack systems integrator, and Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the two companies will collaborate to optimize Mirantis’ Fuel tools for deployment of Red Hat OpenStack, and deliver OpenStack implementation and integration services to joint customers.

Red Hat OpenStack is a highly scalable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) product that delivers an open, flexible, and enterprise-ready private cloud foundation built on the community OpenStack project and integrated with and optimized for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Mirantis offers tools and services for customers to deploy production-grade OpenStack clouds, including Fuel, a tool for management and deployment of OpenStack clouds.

Plans for this collaboration include:

• Through engineering alignment between Red Hat and Mirantis, Fuel will be optimized to deliver point and click, visual deployment, and management of Red Hat OpenStack;
• Mirantis’ and Red Hat’s professional services organizations will work together to deliver comprehensive OpenStack consulting and services, including services for OpenStack deployment and integration;
• Fuel and Red Hat OpenStack will support a joint reference architecture designed by Mirantis and Red Hat for enterprise use; and
• Red Hat and Mirantis will develop mutual customer support processes and case management.

This new development is part of a growing collaboration between the two firms:

• Earlier this month, Red Hat became an investor in Mirantis, along with Ericsson, SAP Ventures, and WestSummit Capital, in an approximately $10 million Series A financing;
• In April, Red Hat introduced Mirantis as one of the first members of the Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network; and
• Also in April, the two companies, along with Hortonworks, announced collaboration on Project Savanna, a program initiated by Mirantis to deliver Apache Hadoop on OpenStack.

“The combination of Red Hat and Mirantis working together with customers to optimize OpenStack should substantially increase the speed of adoption, success, and overall confidence of companies in using the Red Hat OpenStack distribution and Mirantis’ services and tools,” noted Adrian Ionel, president and CEO of Mirantis.

“Mirantis’ implementation tools and services, as well as their track record in building production OpenStack clouds, are very complementary to Red Hat’s focus on providing an enterprise-ready OpenStack distribution, and we're excited about collaborating to help accelerate the adoption of Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure solutions,” noted Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, Virtualization, Red Hat.

“Our collaboration with Red Hat is a testament to our mutual commitment and vision to bring OpenStack to enterprise customers,” continued Ionel. “By integrating technology and services, Mirantis and Red Hat intend to deliver a seamless experience and lifecycle support to enterprise OpenStack customers.”

“Fuel continues to support several OpenStack distributions and a growing number of infrastructure components. At the same time, we believe that Red Hat’s demonstrated commitment to OpenStack and its track record in open source will make them the distribution of choice for production environments,” explained Boris Renski, Mirantis co-founder and executive vice president.