Mirantis Launches First Vendor-Agnostic Certification Program for OpenStack

Mirantis Certification for OpenStack gives professionals the power to implement multiple flavors of OpenStack, and organizations confidence in trainees’ abilities

Mountain View, Calif., December 11, 2013 – Mirantis, the number one pure-play OpenStack vendor, today announced the launch of the Mirantis Certification for OpenStack targeted at systems administrators and OpenStack cloud operators. As a pure play OpenStack vendor with no alternative product portfolio agenda, Mirantis’ Certification for OpenStack aims to certify infrastructure professionals on their proficiency to deploy and operate vendor-agnostic OpenStack environments. Professionals awarded the certification will be able to deploy and operate an OpenStack environment that spans various host operating systems (RHEL, Ubuntu and CentOS), virtualization technologies (KVM, vSphere), storage back-ends (Ceph, NetApp, EMC) and network topologies.

“What enterprises are desperately looking for today is a standards based, cost effective control plane for a heterogeneous, multi-vendor infrastructure environment; and that is precisely the vision behind OpenStack,” said Boris Renski, co-founder and EVP at Mirantis. “We believe that infrastructure experts who complete Mirantis Certification for OpenStack are best positioned to help enterprises realize this cloud vision.”

Mirantis Certification for OpenStack will offer two levels of certification: Mirantis Certified Technician for OpenStack and Mirantis Certified Systems Administrator for OpenStack. Technician level certification will be a pre-requisite for Systems Administrator certification. The Mirantis Certified OpenStack Technician exam is available for enrollment immediately. Certifications will not expire, but will be tied to a specific release of OpenStack in order to ensure that trainees are familiar with the nuances of the OpenStack version of their choice. Certification exams can be taken at any one of 700 Kryterion locations in over 100 countries. Krytrion has been a world leader in test development and delivery since 2001. In addition, professionals can be certified at home or at work using Kryterion online proctoring methodology. Prior to taking the certification exam, individuals may gain more confidence onsite at Mirantis’ three-day OpenStack Bootcamp course, but taking the Mirantis course is not a required pre-requisite for enrollment in the certification exam.

Mirantis takes a unique approach to training, emphasizing a hands-on, problem solving methodology. Nearly three-quarters of the training provided by Mirantis is hands-on with the explicit goal of giving engineers the power to stand up OpenStack distributions from scratch. Trainees will be instructed on OpenStack functionality and deployment by working directly with OpenStack products at their terminals under the supervision of Mirantis instructors. Each trainee can expect to learn the strengths and limitations of each component of OpenStack and to understand how to deploy OpenStack for real world use on multiple nodes. The hands-on emphasis of Mirantis OpenStack training is supplemented by select classroom instruction sessions to help trainees understand the conceptual underpinnings of OpenStack deployment.

“The Mirantis Bootcamp for OpenStack is welcome training for engineers who want to expand their OpenStack skills,” said Umar Saeed, Director of Customer Engineering at PLUMgrid. “I was particularly impressed with the hands-on deployment and troubleshooting exercises, which helped with the understanding of the platform and provided first-hand experience with the technology.”

OpenStack training is a must for engineers looking to build value for customers around the cloud and classes are capped at 12 students in order to ensure that each trainee is given a high level of personal attention. Further, Miranits training provides attendees with the opportunity to meet with fellow engineers from across the cloud ecosystem and develop a deeper understanding of the strengths, weaknesses and direction of the OpenStack project. Since its inception all Mirantis training has been performed with 100% pure open source OpenStack, with no secret sauce or proprietary implementations of any kind.

Mirantis emerged as an early leader in the training space when the company launched its training program for OpenStack in April of 2012. Since then the company has trained thousands of professionals and offers several options for OpenStack courses at multiple locations in the United States and abroad.

“The success of our training program has been hinged on two pillars,” said Lee Xie, Head of Training at Mirantis. “Our vendor-agnostic, pure OpenStack focus coupled with rigorous, hands-on performance-based curriculum. Our certification program builds on the same pillars, ensuring that Mirantis certified professionals are hands-on experts in deployment, management and troubleshooting of vendor-agnostic OpenStack environments.”