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​Mirantis introduces cloud-on-a-rack OpenStack appliances

Mirantis is now offering turnkey OpenStack appliances.
Written by Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Senior Contributing Editor

Setting up an OpenStack cloud isn't easy -- just ask anyone who's tried to set up one from scratch. So, Mirantis, the pure-play OpenStack company, is now offering Mirantis Unlocked Appliances to make it orders of magnitude easier.

OpenStack will run on any high-end x86 server hardware. The first Unlocked Appliances are based on Dell and Juniper hardware. The architecture offers both flexibility and scalability, with configurations ranging from six compute nodes and 12 terabytes of usable storage to a full rack comprised of 24 compute nodes and 24 terabytes of usable storage.

A fully loaded out appliance is made up of two racks sustaining over 1,500 virtual machines and 48 terabytes of storage. The Compute and foundation nodes are based on Dell R630 servers. Storage nodes are based on Dell R730xd servers with Intel SSD-based cache optimized for high-performance storage.

For its cloud software, it uses Mirantis OpenStack 6.1. This OpenStack distribution is based on OpenStack's Juno release 2014.2.2.

These appliances are built, certified, and delivered by Mirantis certified rack partners. The first of these partners to deliver an appliance is Redapt, a cloud-focused systems integrator. As well as building and certifying the appliance, Redapt collaborated with Mirantis to pre-validate the reference architecture.

"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, in a statement. "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."

On the technical side, there's more on the Mirantis' Unlocked Appliance Reference Architecture. The entry-level six-node configuration will list for $250,000, whereas the 16-node version will be about $400,000.

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