Mirantis believes in a web of very open platforms, and not being locked into any specific one.  Adrian Ionel, CEO of Mirantis stopped by #theCUBE at #OpenStack Summit yesterday to talk about the Project Savanna announcement with co-hosts John Furrier and Jeff Frick. Project Savanna is a Hadoop on OpenStack project that was originally started by Mirantis, and now includes Hortonworks and Red Hat. The collaborative effort between Mirantis, Hortonworks, and Red Hat will focus primarily on contributing engineering resources to Project Savanna.

An important first step for Savanna is to provide an integration point for third party Hadoop provisioning and management frameworks. With that integration point in place, it will allow enterprise users to provision Hadoop distributions very quickly via Open Stack APIs and dashboard. This bares noting, because Project Savanna has 3 big players behind it…and we know that one of which is laser-focused on quality.

Earlier this year, Mirantis opened its private library of configuration and deployment tools for Open Stack to the public. That library, called FUEL, has been used in OpenStack projects of its for customers like PayPal, WebEx, and NASA. Ionel pulls back the curtains a bit when he explains that it was a very highly debated topic internally on whether to open source FUEL or not. “A lot of pillow fights,” he joked. In the end, the spirit of the Open Stack community and open source in general won out.

The interview turned to the worries when Furrier asked him what about OpenStack worried him:

• Helping customers be successful in production at scale
• Whatever commitments we have, we live up to and deliver quality that the customers leaves feeling positive

As you can see, that laser-focus on quality I mentioned above carries through. Open source today, isn’t your parents open source of 10 years ago. With OpenStack, you can vet a very solutions oriented service out of the box. If you are a CIO wanting some advice on how to get into the open source world, Ionel has this to say: “Find use cases within your department and prove it out in production.”

You’re the only one holding you back.