Mirantis, which specializes in offering software, support and training for running OpenStack, today announced that it is partnering with Germany-based SUSE, best known for its Linux distribution, to offer its customers support for SUSE’s enterprise Linux offering. The two companies also said that they will work on making SUSE Linux Enterprise Server a development platform for use with Mirantis OpenStack. What’s even more important, though, is that the two companies will also work together to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS.
All of this may sound rather odd at first. Why, after all, would Mirantis want to offer support for these competing distributions, especially given that both SUSE and Red Hat offer their own OpenStack solutions, too. In reality, though, few companies only run one Linux distribution.
“Many of our larger customers run two or three different Linux flavors. Now OpenStack users can get support for their major Linux distributions in one place from Mirantis,” said Mirantis co-founder and CMO, Boris Renski, in a canned statement today. “Thousands of enterprises worldwide across major industries count on SUSE because they offer enterprise-grade, high reliability, bet-your-business service level agreements. Partnering with SUSE gives Mirantis customers access to this support as they build their private cloud.”
Similarly, SUSE’s president of Strategy, Alliances and Marketing Michael Miller told me that his company doesn’t believe in locking in its users. He also added that “where OpenStack is right now, we have to put aside the politics.” In his view OpenStack is still in the early adopter phase and it’s still too complex to deploy and manage. At the same time, the project is also still adjusting to all of the emerging technologies like containers and network function virtualization that sprung up shortly after the OpenStack project launched.
Mirantis’ OpenStack distribution is currently optimized for using CentOS (as the default OS for running the Fuel OpenStack deployment and management service) and Ubuntu (for running the OpenStack nodes). The latest versions of Mirantis already allowed you to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux as OpenStack compute nodes (because the open-source Fuel tool also did), but Mirantis did not offer support for these installs.