At its core, the open-source OpenStack cloud platform is a pluggable framework that enables multiple products and services to be plugged in. The OpenStack Neutron (formerly known as Quantum) project is the leading-edge networking project within OpenStack, providing a framework into which multiple SDN vendors can plug to enable agile networking services.

One of the vendors that can be plugged into OpenStack Neutron is Juniper's open-source Contrail controller. Juniper today announced that OpenStack distribution vendor Mirantis will now be supporting Contrail.

The addition of Mirantis to the supported distribution roster for Contrail is the second major OpenStack distribution addition for Juniper in as many months. Juniper announced a partnership with Canonical for support of its Ubuntu Linux-based OpenStack distribution at the end of February.

Mirantis is a pure-play OpenStack vendor that is focused almost exclusively on OpenStack cloud deployments. In October 2014, Mirantis raised a $100 million series B round of funding for its OpenStack effort, bringing total funding to date for the company up to $120 million.

Juniper isn't the only networking SDN vendor that Mirantis is partnered with for OpenStack Neutron, either. Miranits also has a partnership with VMware for the NSX platform, which gained full support in the Mirantis 5.1 update. The Juniper Contrail support for Mirantis is currently targeted at the Mirantis 6 OpenStack release, which was first released in January of 2015.

"We are now integrating with Juniper Contrail Networking in the spirit of customer choice," Mirantis stated in a blog post. "Providing multiple networking options allows for innovation in infrastructure, giving companies architectures and SLAs tailored to their specific use cases."

As part of the Juniper Mirantis partnership, the two companies have developed a reference architecture to help accelerate deployment. Additionally, the plan is to have a Fuel plugin available in the second quarter of 2015 that will make the integration of Contrail and Mirantis even easier. Fuel is Mirantis's open-source toolkit that provides additional open-source tools, which are not part of the main OpenStack project, for cloud deployment and management.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Enterprise Networking Planet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.