Mirantis: Run Kubernetes On-Premises

OpenStack has helped hundreds of world’s leading brands run their businesses every day. The open source software- powered products and services have undoubtedly reduced the costs and helped things move faster in the online medium. And one of the biggest contributors to OpenStack's products has been a company called Mirantis, based out of Campbell, California.

Founded in 1999, Mirantis has been helping companies by providing continuous delivery of open cloud software. Through the services offered by the company enterprise application owners have been able to liberate themselves from infrastructure and operations concerns.

The company has been leading the conversion of open source innovation into customer value. The flexible infrastructure company has been harnessing its expertise in OpenStack and other technologies to mainly deliver two of its products, Mirantis Cloud Platform and, Mirantis Application platform.

Evolving with times

Mirantis was one of the early ones who bet on OpenStack. For a long time, the company had solely focussed on OpenStack and as it found its place Mirantis too prospered. Mirantis is a core contributor to OpenStack projects and has been ranked as the #1 contributor many times by the lines of code. At one point the company was the largest code-contributor to the OpenStack Newton by lines of code, with its contribution amounting to 32% of all lines of code recorded.

But with time the company has diversified. In 2016, Mirantis debuted its first Kubernetes-related offering. The following year, the company released the Mirantis Cloud Platform which combined OpenStack and Kubernetes. This was widely well-received and has enabled many companies to leverage the power of cloud technology to revolutionize their businesses.

The Mirantis Cloud Platform

The company’s cloud platform comes with a unique build-operate-transfer approach. The Mirantis Cloud Platform can easily apply itself to a company’s use cases and integrate it with the existing ecosystem of monitoring, operations, and ITSM tools. The platform promises 99.99% uptime SLA and no lock-in and delivers zero-downtime updates in partnership with your ops team as they work on developing the internal capabilities.

The platform is also very flexible as it gives enterprises the option of transferring the cloud operations to a managed partner as they train and certify a company’s team in DevOps, cloud software, tooling, and transfer operations processes. As the team gets more adept at handling the cloud operations, Mirantis reduces its support and only intervenes during software escalation issues.

Mirantis has helped enterprises and service providers around the world build and operate some of the largest open clouds in the world. Iconic companies and brands like Volkswagen, Wells Fargo, Adobe, AT&T, Comcast, and Adobe are amongst its huge client portfolio. And the list continues to grow.

Meet the leader

Adrian Ionel, Chairman and CEO

Mr. Ionel is the CEO, Co-Founder and the Chairman of MIrantis. Under his leadership, the company has grown to be one of the most respected companies in open source cloud software. He was the one who initiated the company’s investment into the OpenStack Foundation. Prior to Mirantis, he was the CEO and Founder of eOnline. He also served as the VP and General Manager at Qualys. At Trident Capital, he was one of the Venture partners.

Romanian by birth, Mr. Ionel has lived in multiple countries. He was named as one of the best cloud CEOs in 2015 by Forbes. The company, under his leadership was ranked #6 among the 50 leading cloud companies for Forbes Best Companies to work for. He has an MSEE degree from the University of Erlangen-Nuernberg and started his career in R&D and product management.

Volkswagen trusts Mirantis

Volkswagen, the world’s second largest automaker is a consumer icon. But hundreds and thousands on its workforce today are tackling the new market disruptions. Volkswagen has had to reinvent itself to cater to these new market demands by forging new business models and by re-doing its IT.

A few years back, the company was still looking for a partner to bring upon such a change. The company executives wanted the global standardized IT platform, OpenStack as their partner. Among the companies shortlisted for the partnership was Mirantis. Owing to the capabilities demonstrated by Mirantis, it emerged on top with a staggering execution rate of 98%. It was Volkswagen’s participation in the OpenStack which assured that Mirantis would deliver the advanced capabilities to drive their cloud transformation.

OpenStack is deployed on Volkswagen’s Intel-based servers at their Wolfsburg data center. The data center has the capacity to store more than 5,000 x86 cores, 150,000 GB of RAM, and 600 TB of storage by the end of 2016. Here, well over 2,000 square meters of space has been dedicated to the OpenStack environment which includes 900 cores.

Mirantis has helped Volkswagen expand its cloud infrastructure and they continue to have a very good relationship with the company providing training, support, and operational knowledge whenever necessary.

“As the automotive industry shifts to the service economy, Volkswagen is poised for agile software innovation, Mirantis enables us to drive cloud transformation, helping our developers build and deliver software faster.”

– Mario Muller, VP of IT infrastructure, Volkswagen

“Address key challenges in running Kubernetes on-premises with pure open source software.”

“Take back control of container infrastructure with the battle-tested open source stack, purpose built for running Kubernetes on-premises.”

“Reduce IT expenses 40% to 60% by containerizing with Kubernetes and eliminating proprietary virtualization overhead according to IDC.”