While a lot of interest has developed in the OpenStack framework for managing IT infrastructure, much work still needs to be done on making OpenStack simpler to deploy. To address that issue, Mirantis has donated its Fuel configuration and deployment tool, which it created for OpenStack, to the organization that formally oversees the development of OpenStack.
On the heels of that announcement, Mirantis today announced that FusionStorm has become the second integrator to be certified as a partner to offer Mirantis Unlocked Appliances, which Mirantis developed as a reference architecture for deploying OpenStack on IT infrastructure from Dell and Juniper Networks.
Boris Renski, chief marketing officer for Mirantis, says making Fuel part of the core OpenStack project means that as far as configuration and deployment are concerned, vendors can stop reinventing the wheel.
In general, OpenStack today is mainly being used to manage so-called “cloud native” applications. Much of that interest is driven by a desire to replace proprietary management frameworks with an open source framework. But given the current lack of maturity of OpenStack, most IT organizations are deploying OpenStack in parallel with existing commercial management frameworks.
It’s hard to say how widely adopted OpenStack will become. It still takes a significant amount of engineering expertise to deploy OpenStack at scale. But over time, it’s clear that a massive amount of IT talent is being allocated by multiple vendors to iron out all the OpenStack kinks so that, in 2016, the management framework should be a lot more appealing to the average IT organization.