Mirantis launches OpenStack Express

Mirantis has announced the general availability of Mirantis OpenStack Express, an on-demand private Cloud-as-a-Service for enterprises. The new web service enables companies to stand up private clouds and make them available to developers and end users in minutes.

“Mirantis OpenStack Express is extremely easy to use, straightforward to setup and the support team at Mirantis has been fantastic,” says Binh Phan, Senior Security Architect at McAfee. “This is a dramatically better way to build and run your private OpenStack cloud.” Mirantis OpenStack Express had been in beta release for the past eight weeks and is currently being used by enterprises like Alcatel-Lucent, General Electric, Liberty Mutual, McAfee, Symantec, Sprint and others.

Key customer benefits and features include:
· Instant OpenStack Private Cloud with elastic capacity on-demand. Users can go from sign-up to production in minutes.
· Direct admin control down to the bare-metal host – no sharing of hardware among customers, thereby ensuring predictable SLAs and eliminating the “noisy-neighbor” problem of public clouds.
· Strong security customizable for each customer.
· Pay-per-use model with no upfront investment and no term contract. Simple, transparent pricing starting at $59.98 per day, with $29.99 per day for each additional physical server.
· 24x7 enterprise-grade phone, email and web operations support by OpenStack certified engineers.
· 1-click selection from data center locations in North America, Europe and Asia (Available now: San Jose, Amsterdam, Singapore. Upcoming locations: Hong Kong and London, July; Paris, September).

The new service uses the same zero lock-in Mirantis OpenStack distribution available for on-premise deployment to ensure 100 percent compatibility with upstream OpenStack workload portability.

Mirantis OpenStack Express enables developers and operations teams to stop worrying about making OpenStack work, and invest in what matters -- build and run great applications. For example, with simplified on-boarding of workloads with built-in support for Application Catalogs and Hadoop-on-Demand, customers can greatly accelerate time to value for OpenStack.

“Mirantis OpenStack Express gives developers and operators the reliability, choice and freedom from lock-in they want for their private clouds and now they can get this instantly,” said Adrian Ionel, CEO of Mirantis. “It’s the easiest and most reliable way to stand up and run a private OpenStack cloud, without the expense and hassle of buying and integrating hardware and software.”

"IBM is deeply committed to OpenStack and to delivering OpenStack private clouds on IBM SoftLayer,” said IBM Vice President of Advanced Cloud Solutions and Innovation, Sesh Murthy. “We are thrilled that Mirantis chose IBM Softlayer as their critical infrastructure partner. IBM SoftLayer with its bare-metal servers and best-in-class network is optimized to deliver solutions such as Mirantis OpenStack Express. OpenStack Express represents the accumulation of a year's joint effort between IBM, Mirantis, and the OpenStack community to deliver OpenStack-as-a-Service with a great user experience.”

Mirantis and IBM collaborated earlier this year to demonstrate the scalability of OpenStack using Softlayer’s infrastructure, deploying a cloud with 75,000 virtual machines in 8 hours across multiple data centers 1,800 miles apart. The companies are also working together in the OpenStack community to develop new features to meet the needs of cloud developers and OpenStack users worldwide.