Maxta Hyper-Convergence for OpenStack With Enterprise Data Services

Maxta, Inc. announced solutions to enable hyper-convergence for OpenStack.

Maxta and Mirantis, Inc., deliver on the hyper-convergence to next-generation data centers and clouds, leveraging OpenStack and standard hardware for compute and storage.

Service providers and enterprise customers can build private and public clouds based on OpenStack orchestration software and their choice of x86 server platforms, eliminating the need for complex and expensive storage arrays.

This announcement aligns with Maxta’s vision to run on any x86 server platform and support any compute abstraction while providing the full suite of enterprise data services to meet the demands of private and public clouds. In addition, Maxta announced an expansion of its relationship with Mirantis and that it has joined the OpenStack Foundation with a focus on accelerating the delivery of next-generation data centers.

Maxta is in hyper-convergence and software-defined storage – two fast growing segments that are designed to eliminate the need for storage arrays in modern data centers. By integrating storage functionality into the virtualization layer, shared storage leveraging server-side storage devices is enabled. Additionally, by integrating data services to the data management layer, HA, data availability and data protection are enabled, thereby improving IT simplicity, agility, availability, scalability, and cost.

In virtualization environments such as vSphere and Hyper-V, the virtualization and the data management layers are bundled. However, most OpenStack deployments are based on or moving into open virtualization frameworks such as KVM and Docker containers, which do not provide an integrated data management layer. Maxta’s architecture allows its MxSP software-defined storage to run on any compute abstraction layer, either virtualization or containers, and is the first to create a data management layer for OpenStack, enabling hyper-convergence with enterprise data services for OpenStack environments.

To further accelerate hyper-convergence for data centers, Maxta is collaborating with OpenStack industry providers. Maxta and Mirantis will be providing pure play OpenStack deployments based on MxSP software-defined storage, KVM and/or Docker containers and Mirantis pure play OpenStack distribution.

Interoperability testing was completed and was certified under the Mirantis technology partner program and pre-validated under the MaxDeploy program. These deployments will support high level of data resiliency, availability and protection leveraging a cluster of standard x86 servers, providing agility and scalability for most demanding clouds.

Maxta solutions for OpenStack include support for data center infrastructures based on Intel processors and align with the Intel Software-Defined Infrastructure (SDI) initiative. Recently, Intel awarded Maxta with the Intel Developer’s Forum Most Innovative App for being the first hyper-converged solution to run on the Xeon E5-2600 v3 processors, providing users with 40%+ performance improvements. MaxDeploy for Mirantis OpenStack is pre-validated for Intel rack-mount servers.

“OpenStack is emerging as a key driver for cloud proliferation and innovation,” said Yoram Novick, founder, president and CEO, Maxta. “Maxta is a market leader in hyper-convergence and has brought the flexibility to run on any server, any hypervisor and any storage to OpenStack. By combining our complementary strengths with Intel and Mirantis we have a unique opportunity to fuel the growth of pre-validated OpenStack solutions with the highest degrees of simplicity, scalability, availability and cost savings.”

“As a company committed to pure play OpenStack, we have worked closely with Maxta to ensure that we deliver a pre-tested and pre-validated solution that not only meets Mirantis-specific requirements but also those of the broader OpenStack community,” said Boris Renski, co-founder and CMO, Mirantis.

“Cloud platforms are showing great upside opportunity for first-time adoption,” said Peter Ffoulkes, analyst, 451 Research. “As the development and deployment environment for future enterprise workloads, the choice of cloud platform is a critical strategic decision, probably the most important choice enterprises will make in the next two years. In recent 451 research, we saw continued demand for VMware but surprisingly more than a doubling of interest in OpenStack from 2H’13 to 2H’14. Having an OpenStack eco-system of partners to provide pre-validated hyper-converged solutions will help simplify the process and fuel this adoption rate.“