Tackling the complexities of adopting OpenStack is important to increasing its adoption, so with this in mind, Mirantis is pushing a hardware initiative.

The ‘Mirantis Unlocked Appliances’ will be certified by the company and built by its partners. The purpose of this is to deliver an out of the box cloud solution which can quickly plug into data centres.

Redapt is the main technology partner for building these appliances and configurations will range from six compute nodes with 12 terabytes of storage to a full rack with 24 nodes and 24 terabytes of storage.

The Dell R630-based appliances will be capable of handling over 1,500 virtual machines and the 6 node configuration will sell for $250,000 and a larger 16-node version will cost $400,000.

The aim of the Unlocked Appliance for Cloud Native Applications is to speed the development and deployment of these applications at scale. The first iteration will be powered by Dell and Juniper Networks.