Wind River and Mirantis Collaborate on OpenStack NFV Proof of Concept Project

As part of both companies commitment to industry standards and interoperability, Wind River and Mirantis recently completed a joint Proof of Concept interoperability project at Wind River’s Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) lab in Santa Clara, California.

The goal of the project was modest: to demonstrate that Wind River’s Titanium Server Carrier Grade software virtualization platform could be deployed in federation with the latest, most advanced version of Mirantis Pure Play Web-Scale OpenStack distribution.

As expected, this goal was readily achieved, proving:  A) The significance and importance of adhering to open, standard interfaces; B) The value of healthy ‘coopetition’ for our respective customers and the industry as a whole.

Here are some specifics surrounding the project:

• Hardware Baseline: Dual socket, Intel Xeon E5 Servers (provided by several Titanium Cloud H/W partners)
• Wind River Software Baseline: Titanium Server Release 3
• Mirantis Software Baseline: Mirantis OpenStack 9.1 + Ubuntu 14.04
• Project Configuration:
  
  • Mirantis OpenStack installed as the primary OpenStack Region across one set of servers
  • Titanium Server installed as a secondary OpenStack Region for high performance & high reliability workloads across a second, separate set of servers
  • The Mirantis Region hosted OpenStack Keystone services (user identities and credentials) which were shared with the Titanium Server Region
  • Once installed and operational, the Horizon dashboards of both systems were able to see and administer resources in either Region.  i.e. Using the Mirantis dashboard, users could view and manage the Titanium Server virtual resources and workloads – together with the native Mirantis Region virtual resource and workloads.  Similarly, Titanium Server dashboard users could see and manage resources in either the Titanium Server Region or the Mirantis Region.

The results of this project are extremely important and powerful for the end user.  Having the ability to manage an entire cloud, containing different types of workloads, from a single user interface is fantastic.  By deploying and taking advantage of the shared services  built into OpenStack and enabled through OpenStack Regions, users are able to choose the software platform which best meets the needs and SLAs of their applications and services – without sacrificing ease of use and manageability.

Technical accomplishments aside, this project has shown that together, Wind River and Mirantis have the willingness and capability to leverage their respective strengths to the benefit of their customers.  This is part of the original promise of NFV, and it is impressive to actually see put into practice!

(Originally published on the Wind River blog.)