Mirantis Inc. is consolidating its power over the OpenStack ecosystem with the introduction of a new certification program that aims to help broaden the support for its already widely used distribution of the free cloud platform. No fewer than five partners are throwing their weight behind the effort on launch.

That brings the total number of vendors to have made their technologies compatible with Mirantis OpenStack to 47, which represents a considerable portion of the upstream ecosystem although fewer than the more than 250 claimed by rival Red Hat Inc. That underscores the startup’s position at the top of the project’s food chain, a status that becomes even more evident when looking at the installed base.

Mirantis claims to have more customers running in production than any other rival, including the Linux distributor. Value-add players in the OpenStack community are naturally interested in tapping that audience, which has produced a sort of snowball effect that the startup hopes to harness in order to catch up in areas where the competition does have a lead.

Standing out in particular is third party integration, specifically on the hardware front. Red Hat has offered a reference appliance combining its version of the cloud platform with partner-supplied hardware and management capabilities since last August, which Mirantis is explicitly making one of the key objectives for the new program to match.

Partners who sign up will receive help adding integration with its OpenStack distribution so that customers can manage their solutions, whether hardware or software, through the native management interface. Mirantis is also offering to provide compatibility with Fuel, a relatively new component of the platform its engineers originally developed for internal use and later released to the community that enables rapid installation of applications on the platform.

The first partner-developed appliances featuring the startup’s OpenStack distribution are set to launch sometime this year, presumably sooner rather than later given the fast pace of the competition in the ecosystem. The initial model, which combines servers and storage from Dell Inc. with networking equipment courtesy of Juniper Networks Inc., is being showcased in the Mirantis booth at the OpenStack Summit not far from SiliconANGLE’s live theCUBE broadcast.
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