Mirantis Launches NFV Initiative With Citrix, Metaswitch and Overture Networks

Adoption of Network Function Virtualization on OpenStack to Dramatically Accelerate Service Agility and Innovation for $1.6 Trillion Telecommunications Industry

| Source: Mirantis Mirantis

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwired - Sep 17, 2015) - Mirantis, the pure-play OpenStack company, today unveiled a network function virtualization (NFV) initiative with partners Citrix, Metaswitch Networks and Overture Networks that will unlock communications companies from expensive proprietary hardware, enabling them to launch new services with greater velocity and lower cost.

NFV enables carriers to virtualize network functions by running them as software instances on any hardware platform anywhere within their networks. Mirantis has been implementing NFV projects with telecommunications customers since the technology's inception and will offer an NFV reference architecture and OpenStack validation program for partner virtual network functions (VNFs).

"Telecommunications companies are increasingly drawn to NFV because it frees them from expensive proprietary hardware platforms, reduces operational expenses, and facilitates the launch of new applications and services quickly," said Heather Kirksey, director, OPNFV. "Developers can spend less time on administrative tasks and more time delivering innovative applications and services to consumers."

Mirantis is the largest OpenStack provider for companies in the $1.6 trillion* telecommunications industry. Engagements include the largest OpenStack deal on record with Ericsson, and some of the largest** companies in the U.S., Germany, France, Australia, Saudi Arabia, and the U.K.

"The telecommunications industry is in the midst of a massive transformation. It faces a ballooning customer base consuming massive amounts of data, and competition from a new wave of startups born out of the Web," said Mirantis VP of Product and Partner Marketing, Kamesh Pammaraju. "These companies must innovate, and to do so, their networking needs to be agile, scalable and cost effective. The best way to do this is through NFV, which is why NFV investments will reach nearly $21 billion by 2020.***"

Mirantis' NFV initiative will offer a whitepaper and a deployment guide for customers looking to deploy NFV solutions on OpenStack, and Mirantis OpenStack validation for partner VNF solutions under the Unlocked Technology Partner Program. New partner validations have been completed for:

Mirantis' NFV initiative will also add critical NFV features to Mirantis OpenStack, making it a carrier-grade OpenStack distribution that offers a small physical footprint, high availability (HA), single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) and other NFV features that support high performance VNF deployments.

Mirantis joined OPNFV, a carrier-grade, integrated, open source platform to accelerate the introduction of new NFV products and services, as a silver sponsor in Fall 2014, and will continue to be an active sponsor, offering real-world implementation experience to the community.

Learn more:

About Mirantis
Mirantis is the pure play OpenStack company, delivering all the software, services, training, and support needed for running OpenStack. More customers rely on Mirantis than any other company to get to production deployment of OpenStack at scale. Mirantis is among the top three companies worldwide in contributing open source software to OpenStack, and has helped build and deploy some of the largest OpenStack clouds in the world, at companies such as Cisco, Comcast, Ericsson, NASA, Samsung and Symantec. Mirantis is venture-backed by August Capital, Ericsson, Intel Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures, WestSummit Capital, Sielgler & Guff and Goldman Sachs, with headquarters in Mountain View, California. Follow us on Twitter at @mirantisit.

*Gartner, "Gartner Says Worldwide IT Spending on Pace to Grow 2.4 Percent in 2015," January 12, 2015
**Forbes, "The World's Largest Telecom Companies: China Mobile Beats Verizon, AT&T Again," June 1, 2015
***FierceWireless, "Why AT&T, Verizon, Ericsson and the rest of the industry is embracing SDN and NFV," February 10, 2015

Supporting Quotes

Citrix
"Citrix helps telecom operators drive the transformation to NFV with a true migration path towards scale-out architectures in the virtualized S/Gi-LAN. Using the highly automatable Citrix NetScaler ADC as a key VNF and Mirantis OpenStack, Citrix and Mirantis have developed a validated reference architecture to enable our mutual customers to make the leap without unnecessary risk for numerous operator workloads that require high performance, low latency and service-aware traffic steering. We believe these pre-validated solutions will be a key dimension to achieving a fully automated and virtualized next-generation datacenter and network," - Steve Shah, Vice President of Product Management, NetScaler at Citrix.

Overture
"The Mirantis/Overture offering will deliver on the full promise of NFV through a completely open software solution that incorporates big data-driven orchestration for policy-based automation," noted Houck Reed, Overture vice president of product management. "This pure-play NFV solution set will be designed for optimizing operational efficiency and flexibility for greatest service innovation and savings."

Metaswitch
"We're happy to be working with Mirantis to help network operators of all sizes see the benefits of NFV," says Dave Reekie, SVP, Interconnect Solutions, Metaswitch. "As a virtualized network function, Metaswitch's Perimeta helps network operators secure their large-scale, real-time communications services, while providing a remarkable level of visibility into their networks."

Contact Information:

Mirantis Media Contact:
Sarah Bennett
PR Manager
Mirantis
sbennett@mirantis.com