Pure-play OpenStack vendor Mirantis Inc. has just grabbed a second $100 million funding round led by Intel Capital, with participation from existing investors August Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Ericsson, Sapphire Ventures and WestSummit Capital. Mirantis said it plans to work with Intel to make the open-source framework much simpler to deploy and manage, with the goal of rapidly boosting its enterprise adoption.

Mirantis co-founder and president Alex Freedland said that under the arrangement, Intel has agreed to make its engineering and lab resources available to the company so it can make OpenStack easier to administer. According to him, though many organizations are using OpenStack in production enviroments today, doing so requires they have a large team of IT experts on hand to deploy and maintain it.

What Freedland wants is for OpenStack to evolve to a point where enterprises don’t need to make such a big manpower investment in order to deploy it, he told ZDNet.

“The deal here is that we’re partnering with Intel to put a lot more dollars into making OpenStack enterprise-ready, sooner,” Freedland said.

Alongside Intel, Mirantis is planning to refine all of the components that make up OpenStack into a series of stages. This will eventually make it possible for organizations to launch up to 2,000 OpenStack nodes straight out of the box, Freedland told Data Center Knowledge.

OpenStack came into life as an open-source project started by Rackspace Inc. and NASA that aimed to build the components needed to host public and private clouds on regular hardware. The project now claims over 200 vendors are backing it, including Cisco Systems Ltd., Dell Inc., Google, Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM, Intel, Red Hat Inc., VMware Inc. and many others.

Freedland explained that OpenStack needs to offer as many native services as possible if it’s to be able to compete with Microsoft and VMware, who he named as OpenStack’s biggest rivals in cloud infrastructure. Both companies will continue to expand the scope of the services they embed in their platforms, and so OpenStack needs to keep up, he said.

In addition, Freedland said it’s important for OpenStack’s community to keep working closely with related open-source projects like Kubernetes, Docker and Mesosphere.

As for Intel, its interest in OpenStack stems from the growing number of companies seeking help in setting up their own cloud infrastructure. Jason Waxman, Intel’s VP and GM for Cloud Platforms, told TechCrunch the investment in Mirantis would help expedite OpenStack as an option for customers running its hardware. By collaborating with Mirantis, Intel hopes significant progress can be made in making OpenStack easier to adopt.

Image credit: Mirantis Inc.