Pure-play OpenStack vendor Mirantis Inc. had good news and bad news to reveal at Tuesday’s OpenStack Summit.

The company has signed what could be a profitable deal with the world’s third-largest telecommunications firm, NTT Communications. However, that news was dampened somewhat by the announcement it has to lay off a number of its engineering staff.

With regards to the positive news, NTT has agreed to offer Mirantis Managed OpenStack on its Enterprise Cloud’s Metal-as-a-Service. The service is a fully managed private cloud offering that comes with 24/7 operations and an up to 99.99 percent uptime service level agreement. The service will run on NTT’s Enterprise Cloud, which is also built on OpenStack.

“OpenStack is an essential component of tomorrow’s private cloud architectures, and Mirantis has industry-leading technology and processes in its OpenStack software and services, enabling them to manage OpenStack infrastructure as code,” Hideki Kurihara, NTT’s vice president of cloud services, said in a statement. “Our technical and go-to-market collaboration will enable a true experience of operationalized OpenStack, delivered as a service globally.”

“With direct presence in 87 countries and regions, NTT commands the largest data center footprint in the world,” added Mirantis Chief Marketing Officer and co-founder Boris Renski. “Through this partnership we’ll be able to deliver instant-on, hands-off managed cloud experience for our global customers with compelling economics.”

That won’t do much to assuage the disappointment of Mirantis’s laid-off engineers. Renski confirmed in a statement to ZDNet that following the company’s acquisition of Czech Republic-based firm TCP Cloud a.s. last month, it has decided to wind down certain engineering investments it feels are no longer aligned with its core focus.

“As a result, some engineers were moved to different groups while some others have been let go,” Renski said. “We went through the whole exercise super-fast and probably could have handled internal communications better; guess some of this is now floating out as negative and exaggerated rumors.”

HPE updates Helion OpenStack

In other news out of OpenStack Summit, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. became one of the last major vendors to roll out a new version of its OpenStack distribution based on the earlier Mitaka release. HPE’s Helion OpenStack 4.0 packs improvements spanning ecosystem integration, operations, security, scalability and application performance. The key changes are in admin and security, and are intended to make Helion OpenStack more suitable for information technology departments that value service provision, the company said. Other new features cover auto-scaling of the virtual machine and rolling upgrades, which means users can update to future software distributions without any downtime.

“OpenStack technology has become mainstream, but it can still be complex for the uninitiated,” Mark Interrante, senior vice president for HPE Cloud, said in a statement. “HPE Helion OpenStack 4.0 gives organizations the tools and support they need to build new and update existing applications, without requiring IT’s direct involvement. We call it ‘more dev, less ops.’”

The company also touted the cost benefits of running virtual machines on its OpenStack cloud, which comes to 12 cents a month, compared with 15 cents a month on Amazon Web Services “at scale.” HPE Helion OpenStack 4.0 is available now.

Photo Credit: Mobiloitte Flickr via Compfight cc