Mirantis FUELS Open Source OpenStack with $10 Million Investment

OpenStack services startup Mirantis announced today that it has pulled in another $10 million in venture capital funding, bringing total funding to date up to $20 million.

In January of of this year Mirantis received its first $10 million investment from a number of investors, including Dell Ventures, Intel Capital, WestSummit Capital and Cisco. The new investment announced today includes participation from Ericsson, Red Hat and SAP Ventures.

Mirantis provides services for OpenStack and develops the open source FUEL library of tools, which enables cloud deployment and management.

Alex Freedland, Co-Founder and Chairman of Mirantis, explained to Datamation that the market for OpenStack is large and growing, which is why having more capital is important. Freedland stressed, however, that his company wasn’t looking to take money from just any company. It was important for him to make sure that the companies that are investing also have a vested interest in the success of the OpenStack ecosystem.

The plan is for Mirantis to grow not just by virtue of the financial investment made by Ericsson, Red Hat and SAP Ventures but also by way of market partnerships with those vendors.

While the OpenStack market is a hot one, Mirantis is not looking to sell off and be acquired either.

“Management and the Board are not looking to sell,” Freedland said. “We see tremendous potential and see tremendous growth and that’s the reason why we align our investors the way we do.”

FUEL

In addition to the new funding, Mirantis is now expanding its FUEL toolset to version 3.0. FUEL is a set of tools that enables users to deploy and manage production grade OpenStack clouds.

With the new release, Mirantis is adding a visual, intuitive interface for FUEL that is intended to make it easier to use and manage. Freedland explained that the new interface is written in Ruby on Rails and is all open source.

Moving forward, Mirantis is currently working on a FUEL Enterprise that will layer additional commercial features on top of the open stack base. Freedland noted that Mirantis will not be dual-licensing the open source FUEL stack, but rather the enterprise bits will provide additional capabilities outside of the core that is required for OpenStack.

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