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Tag: Mirantis

IREN to Acquire Mirantis to Reduce IT Infrastructure Management Friction

IREN Ltd, a provider of cloud infrastructure services, today revealed its intent to acquire Mirantis, a provider of open source OpenStack and Kubernetes software that is deployed in both cloud computing and on-premises IT environments.

Under terms of the agreement valued at $625 million, Mirantis will operate as an independent subsidiary of IREN, a former provider of bitcoin mining services that now specializes in hosting artificial intelligence (AI) workloads.

Dominic Wilde, senior vice president of marketing for Mirantis, said that while Mirantis will continue to engage with the more than 1,500 IT organizations it supports directly, the combined entity will reduce friction as IT teams move to deploy AI workloads that require deeper levels of infrastructure integration. That level of alignment will benefit IT organizations that are customers of both companies, he added.

Privately held, Mirantis has long provided a distribution of OpenStack and more recently has been curating a distribution of Kubernetes for cloud-native application environments. Most recently, Mirantis launched a k0rdent AI platform to provide a control plane to integrate the management of infrastructure across bare metal, virtual machines and Kubernetes environments. Earlier this year, Mirantis also made available a reference architecture for building and deploying AI workloads on Kubernetes clusters that is based on the k0rdent AI platform.

The overall goal is to make it simpler to build multi-tenant environments spanning multiple classes of processors using a set of reusable templates spanning compute, storage, networking and graphical processor units (GPUs) from NVIDIA, AMD and Intel.

IREN, meanwhile, will be able to leverage those frameworks to deploy workloads faster in a way that also serves to optimize workload performance and reduces total costs.

It’s unclear to what degree the management of infrastructure will further unify in the age of AI, but there is a growing amount of cost sensitivity. The underlying graphical processor units (GPUs) needed to run AI workloads remain scarce. Paradoxically, overall GPU utilization rates remain relatively low, creating an opportunity to use platforms like Mirantis to distribute AI workloads across servers and clusters in a way that should reduce the total IT costs.

There is, of course, no shortage of providers of distributions of Kubernetes and OpenStack platforms. The challenge has always been determining which providers of these distributions have the best tools and frameworks that DevOps teams need to deploy and manage these open source platforms at scale.

Unfortunately, many IT teams lack the IT infrastructure management expertise required to deploy and manage AI workloads. In fact, many organizations are underestimating the total cost of AI by not factoring in the amount of IT infrastructure that will be required to run these types of workloads at scale. As the pressure to operationalize AI continues to increase, the number of infrastructure challenges that IT teams will encounter will only continue to expand, especially as responsibility for managing the IT infrastructure needed to run these application shifts from data science to IT operations teams. The issue then becomes not just finding the best way to streamline the management of that IT infrastructure, but also justifying the level of investment that is going to ultimately be required.

May 5, 2026
Mirantis Adds Modeling Tool to Configure Private Cloud

At the Open Infrastructure Summit conference, Mirantis today unfurled a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application through which IT administrators can employ modeling tools to configure private clouds based on either OpenStack or Kubernetes.

Boris Renski, chief marketing officer for Mirantis, said rather than having to manually configure a private cloud for an on-premises IT environment using YAML files, the Model Designer for Mirantis Private Cloud enables IT administrators to configure a private cloud using modeling tools they access via a graphical interface (GUI). The Model Designer is scheduled for general availabilility in May.

That approach then makes it feasible for IT administrators with little to no programming expertise to quickly spin up private clouds within the context of a DevOps environment using a set of declarative tools, added Renksi.

Those tools also enable IT administrators to specify the degree of configurability they require. A basic configurability level automatically populates most of the cluster settings to a default set of pretested values. The most advanced “ultraviolence” configurability setting enables IT administrators to adjust virtually every aspect of their on-premises cloud. The resulting configuration models are then fed into DriveTrain, which is the automation framework that Mirantis provides within Mirantis Private Cloud.

Renski said requiring IT administrators to master all the nuances associated with managing YAML files to stand up a private cloud is one of things holding back adoption of both on-premises private clouds and the best DevOps practices that should be relied to mange them. Most organizations that want to make the transition to DevOps clearly want to be able to manage infrastructure as code in much the same way public cloud service providers do today. The challenge is, the learning curve associated with achieving that goal is simply too high for the average IT administrator, he said, adding a modeling tool made available as SaaS application will make it possible for even mere IT mortals to easily spin up a private cloud within an on-premises IT environment.

Both OpenStack and Kubernetes suffer to varying degrees from often being too complex for the average IT organization to set up. Because of those complexity issues, adoption of both platforms often is limited to IT organizations that have advanced IT skills. But as the deployment processes surrounding both platforms become more automated, it’s probable the number of organizations adopting either platform will increase. At the same, IT organizations that do embrace either platform more likely will spin up more instances once they no longer have to rely on a cumbersome manual set of processes.

Of course, setting up a private cloud based on either OpenStack or Kubernetes is only the beginning of the IT challenge. Once all those private clouds are deployed, IT organizations need to acquire the tools and expertise required to manage them on an ongoing basis. In fact, one of the things IT organizations should consider in the age of the private cloud is the level of integration of the tools from vendors they intend to rely on to set up and then manage a private cloud.

— Mike Vizard

April 29, 2019
Mirantis Modeling Tool Extends SDI Scope and Reach

Mirantis has added a modeling tool to its portfolio that enables users to allocate IT infrastructure that has been distributed across multiple data centers to a common set of workloads.

Company CEO Adrian Ionel said the latest edition of the Mirantis Cloud Platform (MCP) for building provide clouds on OpenStack or Kubernetes platforms now includes a Mirantis Infrastructure Model Designer tool that makes it possible to manage IT infrastructure residing in multiple data centers as though they were one logical resource. In effect, slices of distributed data centers can be allocated to run specific classes of application workloads, he said.

The Mirantis tool is based on open source software spanning Cookiecutter, Reclass and Salt projects that Mirantis is employing to enable users to apply management templates across multiple distributed data centers. The goal is to make it possible for IT organizations to employ a software-defined framework that makes it easier to not only manage distributed IT environments, but also change the configuration of those environments as the nature of application workloads change over time, Ionel said.

The Mirantis modeling tool provides a declarative approach to managing software-defined infrastructure that doesn’t require IT operations teams to learn how to program, he added.

Ionel said that as IT organizations invest in IT infrastructure, they need to deploy multiple classes of application workloads on the same systems. Each of those application workloads has distinctly different attributes and requirements. For example, a big data application running on Hadoop today has different infrastructure requirements than an analytics application infused with machine learning data that might be deployed tomorrow. That said, most IT organizations won’t be able to replace IT infrastructure as application workloads evolve, he said, noting the Mirantis tool provides a means to easily reconfigure IT infrastructure from a central location without requiring IT personnel to be present in each local data center.

Virtualization of servers and now storage and networks is a concept that has now permeated data centers for decades. Mirantis is effectively taking that concept to its next logical conclusion by making it possible to maximize utilization of data centers. In fact, Ionel noted, templates can be configured to prioritize the running of different workloads on the same infrastructure.

As software-defined infrastructure (SDI) continues to mature, it’s becoming apparent that data centers soon will be managed at much higher levels of abstractions than they typically are today. Instead of trying to navigate individual compute, storage and networking silos, IT organizations will be able to manage data center resources on demand. The implications of the level of automation go well beyond simply enabling IT organizations to be more agile—the entire organizational structure of IT organizations will need to evolve.

Obviously, organizations that have embraced DevOps are further down than the SDI path than most. But as SDI continues to be able to automate IT infrastructure at levels of unprecedented scale, it’s clear there’s still a long road ahead in terms of how just how extended those DevOps processes can become.

— Mike Vizard

August 28, 2018
Mirantis CEO Charts Hybrid Cloud Path Forward

Adrian Ionel is back at the helm of Mirantis as CEO at a time when the shift to hybrid cloud computing is tantalizingly close to being an everyday IT reality.

Adrian Ionel, Mirantis CEO

Ionel is one of the original co-founders of Mirantis, which provides a curated instance of OpenStack and Kubernetes cluster software alongside a suite of services to manage them on behalf of a customer. Ionel replaces Alex Freeland, who will remain on the board of directors of Mirantis.

The decision to shift leaders is being driven by the need for Mirantis to grow more rapidly at a time when IT organizations soon will be moving toward unifying the management of multiple clouds, said Ionel.

While Mirantis owes its existence to OpenStack, the company has been rapidly developing Kubernetes expertise that is at the heart of a recently unfurled managed hybrid cloud computing service. Ionel said the rise of Kubernetes provides a unique opportunity to manage private and public cloud services based on Kubernetes via a central control plane.

The challenge Mirantis will face in achieving that goal is the reluctance IT organizations historically have shown when it comes relinquishing control over their IT environments to a third party. In addition, an already fierce number of rival managed service providers (MSPs) also are moving to embrace Kubernetes.

Ionel said most IT organizations underestimate the complexity of managing multiple clouds. As more of them come to that realization, the number of organizations looking to rely more on external expertise to deploy modern microservices-based applications on Kubernetes should increase substantially. To facilitate that transition, Mirantis has crafted a hybrid Kubernetes service that can be invoked programmatically by developers. A crucial factor driving that decision will be increased awareness of the perils of being locked into a specific public cloud service provider. In fact, Ionel noted that many IT organizations today underestimate how easy it is to become entangled by proprietary application programming interfaces (APIs) on a public cloud service such as Amazon Web Services (AWS).

For the immediate future Ionel said Mirantis expects to see most instances of Kubernetes to be deployed on top of virtual infrastructure. Use of Kubernetes on bare-metal systems is confined largely to application development, he said. But as Kubernetes continues to mature, Ionel noted it’s only a matter of time before IT organizations will be deploying more instances of Kubernetes running on both virtual machines and bare-metal servers. That, of course, will further add to the complexity that needs to be navigated.

Ionel said rivals underestimate just how healthy the current Mirantis business is as use of OpenStack continues to increase. AT&T, for example, has now deployed more than 10,000 nodes employing instances of OpenStack provided by Mirantis, he said.

New CEOs don’t usually magically transform a company by their mere presence. But in the case of Mirantis, the opportunity for Ionel to turn potential in real growth is higher, for no other reason than he doesn’t have to first learn how the company operates.

— Mike Vizard

February 5, 2018