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Mirantis and UCloud in joint bid to tap massive potential of Chinese cloud market

ChinaSoftware and services vendor Mirantis and Chinese cloud operator UCloud have announced a joint venture to speed OpenStack adoption in China’s finance, telecom, state-owned enterprises and large internet businesses.

The venture, dubbed UMCloud, will be led by UCloud CEO and founder Xinhua Ji with head offices in Shanghai, China.

Investment in cloud computing infrastructure in China is estimated by consultancy Bain & Company to be growing faster than overall IT spending and projected to reach $20 billion by 2020, a compound annual growth rate of 40% to 45%. In 2014, China had more than 640 million internet users – more than the USA, India and Japan combined. In 2013, smartphone use in China exceeded 700 million units and 530 million of these Chinese smartphone users accessed the internet from their mobile device.

Cloud computing is a national strategic policy and the government included it in the nation’s 12th Five-Year Plan. Last December, the Ministry of Industry and Information (MIIT) officially declared its intention to support OpenStack ecosystems and to encourage state-owned enterprises to use OpenStack-based cloud products.

California based software and service vendor Mirantis is described as pure-play OpenStack company with installations at AT&T, Ericsson, Walmart and Wells Fargo. It has been funded by a quarter of a billion dollars in venture capital since 2012 and is the second highest contributor of open source software code to OpenStack. Mirantis’ Chinese clients include telco hardware makers Jiesai, Huawei and ZTE.

UCloud is China’s top independent public cloud service provider with clients using e-commerce, gaming, mobile internet and SaaS services, from data centres in China, Hong Kong and the US. The company announced a $100 million Series C financing round in April, with $160 million raised to date.

“China and the United States are two countries where cloud computing is developing the fastest,” said Alex Freedland, president and co-founder of Mirantis, “we see unlimited potential for OpenStack as a major cloud engine in China.”

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Intel, Ericsson bet $100m on Mirantis and OpenStack

OpenStack vendor Mirantis is raking in buy-in from investors

OpenStack vendor Mirantis is raking in buy-in from investors

Pure play OpenStack vendor Mirantis has secured $100m in new funding this week in a round led by Intel Capital, with the companies also announcing deepened collaboration in the cloud arena.

The latest round, which comes less than a year after Mirantis secured $100m in series B funds from investors, also included participation from new investor Goldman Sachs and existing investors August Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Ericsson, Sapphire Ventures (formerly SAP Ventures) and WestSummit Capital.

Mirantis said the cash will be used to bolster its partnerships with vendors and other organisations innovating with OpenStack.

“With Intel as our partner, we’ll show the world that open design, open development and open licensing is the future of cloud infrastructure software. Mirantis’ goal is to make OpenStack the best way to deliver cloud software, surpassing any proprietary solutions,” said Alex Freedland, co-founder and president of Mirantis.

“Every industry is being disrupted by software. Smart enterprises are embracing the cloud to grow top line revenues and get new services to market faster. Mirantis is the only vendor 100 per cent committed to only OpenStack,” Freedland said.

At the same time, Intel and Mirantis announced the two companies would deepen their partnership and work together on Intel’s Clouds for All initiative, a series of partnerships with ISVs announced earlier this summer which are intended to accelerate cloud interoperability and boost deployments.

“Our investment in Mirantis is the next step in bringing open cloud infrastructure to the entire industry as part of Intel’s ‘Cloud for All’ initiative,” said Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager, Data Center Group, Intel.

“As enterprises embrace public, private and hybrid cloud strategies, they need choices in their infrastructure software. OpenStack is an ideal open solution for cloud-native applications and services, and our collaboration with Mirantis is well placed to ensure the delivery of critical new enterprise features helping to create of tens of thousands of clouds,” Bryant said.

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Mirantis gets into the OpenStack converged infrastructure game

Mirantis is teaming up with Dell and Juniper to create converged infrastructure solutions

Mirantis is teaming up with Dell and Juniper to create converged infrastructure solutions

Mirantis unveiled plans to work with a range of vendors to deliver OpenStack-based converged infrastructure solutions for enterprises.

The Mirantis Unlocked Appliances are built by Rack Partners and come pre-validated by Mirantis with its own commercial distribution of OpenStack and pre-integrated by Certified Rack Partners.

This is Mirantis’ first big foray into the converged infrastructure area – a segment dominated by Dell and HP, which offers its own HP Helion OpenStack-based converged infrastructure solutions.

“The architecture Redapt designed with Mirantis, with Mirantis OpenStack at the core, solves for the complexity commonly associated with OpenStack,” said Josh Lindenbaum, vice president of business & corporate development, Redapt. “Redapt will work closely with customers to assemble, deliver and install Mirantis Unlocked Appliances that will arrive in the datacentre ready to plug and play.”

Its inaugural offering is tailored specifically for cloud-native applications, though it said it plans to release a broader portfolio of converged infrastructure solutions as it partners with more hardware and software vendors.

The first configuration will be built using server and networking technology provided by Dell (PowerEdge R630 servers for compute and foundation nodes and Dell PowerEdge R730xd for storage) and Juniper Networks (QFX5100s as the data path and a Juniper EX3300 for management) respectively, with configurations ranging from six compute nodes and 12 TB of storage to a full rack comprised of 24 compute nodes and 24 TB.

“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.

“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,” Freedland said.