Mirantis to offer commercial support for OpenContrail SDN platform

As Mirantis is moving away from the ‘pure-play OpenStack company’ tagline, it’s adding more managed services to its resume to take on players like RackSpace and AWS. Mirantis is now offering commercial support for OpenContrail, an extremely popular software-defined networking (SDN) platform used with OpenStack.

There are three core components on any cloud: compute, storage and networking. Networking is becoming a very interesting field as companies like AT&T are betting big on OpenStack and software-defined networking to build their networks.

“SDN is no longer a disruptive innovation, but an integral, commodity part of any large-scale cloud environment. It needs to be supported and managed as a part of the stack, not as a stand alone software component,” said Boris Renski, Mirantis co-founder and CMO.

With this commercial support, Mirantis is addressing the demand for support and management of the networking stack. Last year Mirantis acquired TCP Cloud, and restructured the company into two distinct business units: one unit focused on services around cloud and the other on developing and shipping products.

Mirantis will use TCP Cloud’s technology for continuous delivery of cloud infrastructure to manage the OpenContrail control plane, which will run in Docker containers. “As a part of the effort, Mirantis has also been actively contributing to the OpenContrail open source project,” the company said in a press release.

It’s the right move at the right time. It’s challenging to generate revenue from open source, commodity software as a product. Red Hat is doing great with their RHEL, but they also continue to expand their product portfolio that increasingly involves services. Mirantis is evolving with the changing market and moving towards a more sustainable business model: support and managed services.

More and more companies are adopting cloud and containers, but not all of them, especially those who are not IT companies, want to invest heavily in DevOps talent. They continue to look for providers like Mirantis that can offer managed services while giving them total control over their private cloud.