Do you want to use OpenStack, but you're afraid of the headaches of getting its architecture just right? Well, EMC is here to help with OpenStack reference architectures for three leading OpenStack vendors: Canonical, Mirantis, and Red Hat.

Of this trio, Mirantis, a pure-play OpenStack company, is the first with a ready to go reference architecture. Its Mirantis OpenStack 6.0 is certified with the EMC VNX, EMC XtremIO, and EMC ScaleIO storage platforms. With it, cloud architects, cloud operators and IT administrators can build enterprise-class, scalable, and multi-tenant OpenStack clouds using EMC storage products.

As part of the certification, EMC and Mirantis have delivered a reference architecture. This is the first to publish under EMC's OpenStack Reference Architecture Program. It demonstrates how to use EMC storage systems, Mirantis OpenStack, and Cinder block storage drivers together in an OpenStack environment.

In a blog, EMC's Senior Director of Technology Alliances, Dorian Aron Naveh stated, "The reference architectures are complemented with best practices and deployment tools from EMC's partners built upon experience with large scale cloud deployments. EMC, in partnership with networking power Brocade, has tested out these reference architectures with fully functional lab environments and standard 'out-of-the-box' OpenStack distributions from our partners with EMC VNX and XtremIO arrays, EMC's ScaleIO Software Defined Storage, and Brocade's 6510 switches.The EMC drivers used in the Reference Architecture Program are available directly with your preferred partner distribution."

EMC claims that each configuration had been optimized to make deployment a repeatable and reliable process, showcase the functionality of the solution, and simplify the implementation process itself. Each reference architecture also comes with documentation and software certification.

Boris Renski, Mirantis co-founder and CMO, said in a statement, "Many of our customers want to transition their architecture into a cloud model, but they cannot simply rip-and-replace their existing infrastructure. Certifying EMC on Mirantis OpenStack ensures that they will be able to leverage their existing EMC storage investments and new scale-out storage products with Mirantis OpenStack, easing their transition into next-generation cloud platforms."

"Many EMC customers, including large enterprises with mission-critical apps, are asking to use EMC storage solutions with OpenStack to build a scalable private cloud," added Peter Cutts, EMC's VP of Cloud Technology Solutions "With Mirantis, they leverage OpenStack's flexibility, modularity and cost efficiencies with EMC's storage solutions. The result is a powerful, enterprise-ready cloud storage solution."

EMC has been taking the cloud much more seriously in the last year. In October, the storage company launched EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. This enables customers to move applications and workloads across public and private cloud services across OpenStack, Microsoft, VMware and Amazon Web Services. Immediately afterwards, EMC purchased three cloud companies, including an OpenStack startup, Cloudscaling.

I see this as a major step forward in OpenStack cloud adoption not just for EMC, but for the whole OpenStack ecosystem. One major problem with OpenStack has been a shortage of experienced engineers and architects. With reference architectures, which cover both the hardware and software sides of deployment, gettting OpenStack up and running will become much easier.

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