Interview: Q&A with Mirantis Talking about OpenStack and Open Sourcing Vendor Certifications

Mirantis, the number-one pure-play OpenStack vendor, recently announced an initiative to “open source vendor certifications.” To find out more about what that means, CloudCow.com spoke with the company’s VP of Marketing, David Fishman.

 

 

David Fishman: Large companies have historically used certifications to build artificial competitive barriers against smaller, disruptive vendors. As a result these smaller companies, who may have otherwise superior technologies, find that they’re not “certified” to run on the products of larger vendors. We’re already seeing these kind of “closed-door open source” plays happen in OpenStack; the goal of this initiative is to level the playing field. The objective is to provide the OpenStack community with a standard, open, set of tools that vendors can use to self-certify the compatibility of their solutions with the upstream OpenStack codebase. Any vendors can set up their own internal testing labs, link those labs to the community-driven OpenStack continuous integration system, and dynamically expose the results of their certification tests in a publicly available dashboard.

 

 

Fishman: It’s not uncommon that these artificial certification barriers create a perception of greater risk, which larger vendors use to to extract premiums from customers and slow the pace of infrastructure innovation. With this initiative there will be a free open source of information available to customers detailing how the products of OpenStack vendors, Mirantis included, integrate with the wider OpenStack codebase. Customers win because they get all the facts to judge the performance of all OpenStack offerings against a common yardstick, without the obstruction of product certifications.

 

What’s more, it’s often the case that customers are reluctant to upgrade their IT infrastructure because “at least we know that what we have today works together.” When certification information becomes more transparent, there’s less of a reason to stay with outdated technology, because you’ll have better visibility into an upgrade path.

 

 

Fishman: Not directly. Mirantis wants to see OpenStack enable a vendor-agnostic cloud in practice, not just in theory. This initiative speaks to OpenStack’s larger mission of reducing the value of incumbency inherently enjoyed by large vendors over small ones. That incumbency is often positioned as “certification”, but it’s just a disguise for “we’ve always done it that way.” Products should be judged solely on their own merits and should be totally interoperable with one another. If a customer wants to use one vendor’s OS, and another’s hypervisor and a third’s storage backend, they should be able to do so. The open certification initiative represents a step towards that goal by allowing customers complete visibility over how every vendor’s products integrate with the upstream OpenStack codebase.

 

 

Fishman: Absolutely! We’re offering free support to vendors setting up their internal testing labs. Our support experts will bring a combination of hands-on developer and administrator skills and experience in data-center environments to help vendors identify, troubleshoot, resolve, and restore any testing issues in a timely fashion. In addition, my colleague Jay Pipes recently joined the Mirantis team and has already authored three different posts to help vendors join and actively participate in the open certification initiative.

 

 

Fishman: More than a dozen major infrastructure vendors, including VMware, NetApp and HP, as well as large OpenStack users such as Yahoo and AT&T, are supporting the initiative. We’ll be asking all partners integrating with Mirantis OpenStack to formally join this effort, and we expect others to do so as well — basically, anyone who can benefit from a more direct route to market between OpenStack suppliers and OpenStack users.

 

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