Who Exactly is Using Mirantis OpenStack?
This question comes up a lot — who exactly is using Mirantis OpenStack? In fact, we were honored to have been mentioned in the recent Red Hat earnings call. The insinuation was that Mirantis is utilized by customers who are playing around with OpenStack and simply need some professional services. Actually, this is not true. We have dozens of customers who are past the experimentation phase and well into production with our pure-play distribution Mirantis OpenStack.
In fact, we just posted three new customer case studies on our site. These new customer case studies span industries. The first one, Saudi Telecom, tells the story of how they are using Mirantis OpenStack to offer cloud services to their end users in an effort to maintain their market leadership. The second case study is about a technology savvy enterprise that happens to be in the Hollywood/Media & Entertainment industry, where the twin pain points of spiky rendering workloads and being under attack from software-rich startups is motivating a digital transformation based on a private cloud powered by Mirantis OpenStack. Finally, the third case study is a SaaS provider that simply needs to move to a private cloud architecture from a legacy environment to enable their move to DevOps and cloud native applications. While the cloud has many other benefits in terms of cost savings and improved application availability, the primary benefit for this customer is AgileIT, leading to dramatically higher software velocity.
Saudi Telecom is the the largest service provider in the Middle East and North Africa. To maintain their leadership, STC felt it was very important to have public and managed cloud services in their portfolio, enabling STC customers to focus on their core business as opposed to managing their information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure. STC had seen many other telecom providers fail with this exact strategy, however, so they made two very important choices as they embarked on this journey. First, they decided to add value to the platform through a marketplace of local and regional software providers so the cloud would have unique value not available through the larger/global public cloud players. Second, they decided to go with open-source software to avoid vendor lock-in. STC decided to use Mirantis OpenStack, and their cloud is available at https://www.kloudu.net.
Many of our customers want to remain anonymous, and we respect their privacy. With that preamble, this customer story is about a very large Hollywood Giant using Mirantis OpenStack as a way to build elastic rendering clouds and foster innovation through new app development. Video post production is a very spiky workload and the current mechanism of ordering hardware and building a dedicated infrastructure per project creates long delays and is tremendously wasteful. By using a centralized rendering cloud based on Mirantis OpenStack, the customer expects improved utilization, rapid provisioning, and lower capital and operating costs. Moreover, businesses such as set-top box and video services are dependent on software innovation for their future. This requires a platform that is on-demand and elastic with self-service APIs. Furthermore, it must be just as easy to deprovision as provision, so that business managers might take risks and try things out. The private cloud serves this second need as well with provisioning times plummeting from 10 weeks to 10 minutes.
SaaS providers seem to have a pattern. Part of their dev and app hosting is on physical on-prem infrastructure that is rigid, poorly utilized and expensive. Another part of their dev is on public clouds, which is OK for some SaaS providers and not OK for others. In this particular case, the customer wanted to bring both dev and app hosting into a private cloud. In fact, the private cloud was pivotal in their cloud transformation effort. DevOps and cloud native apps are simply not possible without an API driven elastic environment. This customer has done a lot of quantitative measurements of the benefits of OpenStack. Their provisioning times have been slashed from 8 weeks to minutes, and they have saved $1.5M on platform costs. Finally, their app availability has improved, resulting in increased customer satisfaction.
In summary, a large number of telecom providers, technology savvy enterprises and SaaS companies are using Mirantis OpenStack to create webscale clouds in production to run mission critical workloads. Check out our three new case studies for a concrete look at how.