OpenStack marked another milestone in its breakneck evolution this week after the introduction of a new hyperconverged appliance from Mirantis Inc. that comes pre-integrated with its commercial distribution. The launch is aimed at extending the appeal of the platform to the majority of organizations that lack the will and resources to cobble together an implementation from scratch.

That complexity is inherent to OpenStack, which is specifically designed to run on heterogeneous infrastructure – and in particular the commodity kind – to enable freedom of choice. Bundling the platform into a proprietary appliance that locks users into a single upgrade path undermines that mission, but fortune has it practicality trumps principle in the world of enterprise technology.

As a result, the move puts Mirantis in a much better position to drive the adoption of its OpenStack distribution, especially since the partners involved in the development and delivery of the appliance also have it in their interest to help promote the appliance. No fewer than three separate vendors are involved in the distributor’s foray into hyperconvergence.

Chief among them is Redapt Inc., which integrates the servers and storage supplied by long-time Mirantis partner Dell Inc. with networking equipment from Juniper Networks Inc. into the finished product. The box that customers receive at the end of the line comes with  six compute nodes and 12 terabytes of storage that can be more than doubled in a full-rack setup.

The system is the first in a planned series that, if other vendors in that space are anything to go by, will incorporate hardware from different manufacturers to provide customers with a broader choice of configurations. That would give Mirantis an edge over Red Hat Inc., which does not yet have a hypeconverged offering.

Of course, Mirantis’ move may very well prompt its rival to move down the same path and start partnering with vendors to offer integrated systems featuring its own OpenStack distribution. But chances that would happen sooner or later anyway given the tremendous demand for hyperconvergence appliances and the strategic imperative of lowering the adoption barrier of OpenStack.

Photo via Dell