SDN start-up PLUMgrid received a major endorsement from an OpenStack pioneer this week with a worldwide resale agreement with cloud provider Rackspace.
Rackspace will resell PLUMgrid’s full SDN product line, including its Open Networking Suite for OpenStack, CloudApex, and support and training services. The agreement is non-exclusive, meaning Rackspace also has the option to resell SDN products from PLUMgrid competitors, and PLUMgrid can sell through other cloud providers.
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But Rackspace does not have a “NASCAR line-up of 10 SDN partners” that it resells product from, says Bryan Thompson, senior director of product at Rackspace.
“Our strategy is not to partner broadly,” Thompson says.
Rackspace evaluated three or four SDN vendors before choosing PLUMgrid, he says.
“The others were just offensive in how they integrated with OpenStack,” Thompson says.
PLUMgrid CEO Larry Lang says his company is partnering with “the Godfather of OpenStack.” Rackspace is a founder of the OpenStack initiative.
“A good wedding is great but you have to make sure it’s an excellent marriage,” Lang said of the new resale arrangement.
PLUMgrid’s products have been validated to run with Rackspace’s Private Cloud powered by OpenStack service. PLUMgrid’s products enable microsegmentation and firewall service insertion through their Virtual Domains feature; distributed and programmable data plane forwarding via IO Visor software; and real-time SDN visualization and monitoring through CloudApex.
PLUMgrid has 70 OpenStack cloud customers. The company’s ONS product also supports Mirantis OpenStack, RDO, Red Hat OpenStack, and Ubuntu OpenStack by Canonical distributions and installers, in addition to the Rackspace private OpenStack cloud service.
PLUMgrid will be demonstrating ONS at next week’s Rackspace::Solve event in New York. The company was founded in 2011 by ex-Cisco engineers.