Serdar Yegulalp
Senior Writer

Mirantis, IBM give businesses 75,000 reasons to adopt OpenStack

analysis
Feb 27, 20142 mins

Using SoftLayer, Mirantis' performance benchmarks show OpenStack can scale to 75,000 VMs, and potentially beyond

When Mirantis wanted to see how well OpenStack scaled when dealing with tens of thousands of VMs, it teamed up with IBM’s SoftLayer to create some benchmarks. The results: Some 75,000 small VMs were deployed over approximately 8 hours, with VMs taking around 200 seconds on average to boot.

The results, published at Mirantis’s blog, go into considerable detail about how Mirantis obtained its numbers, though the stats in question mainly focus on provisioning concurrency, as well as deployment and boot times.

Mirantis’ infrastructure, running version 4.0 of its OpenStack product (the Havana release), was built on approximately 350 physical machines provisioned at SoftLayer’s data centers and mainly measured how quickly the whole system could boot new VMs when receiving multiple concurrent requests. For the test, the OpenStack setup was stripped down to only its compute, image, and identity components (Nova, Glance, and Keystone, respectively) and used the Rally engine for the actual testing.

The best results — in terms of boot time and success rate — came when booting a total of 75,000 VMs with around 250 simultaneous connections. Mirantis claims its OpenStack distribution can support up to 500 simultaneous requests.

Red Hat has become one of the most familiar faces in the commercial OpenStack world, but Mirantis has also been cementing ties with the likes of Dell and Intel; all three companies are foundational OpenStack Foundation members. To push its OpenStack over the competition, Mirantis stresses it’s a pure open source distribution, with no lock-ins to a specific vendor product (as with, Red Hat Enterprise Linux), but at the same time enterprise-ready.

This story, “Mirantis, IBM give businesses 75,000 reasons to adopt OpenStack,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.

Serdar Yegulalp

Serdar Yegulalp is a senior writer at InfoWorld. A veteran technology journalist, Serdar has been writing about computers, operating systems, databases, programming, and other information technology topics for 30 years. Before joining InfoWorld in 2013, Serdar wrote for Windows Magazine, InformationWeek, Byte, and a slew of other publications. At InfoWorld, Serdar has covered software development, devops, containerization, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, winning several B2B journalism awards including a 2024 Neal Award and a 2025 Azbee Award for best instructional content and best how-to article, respectively. He currently focuses on software development tools and technologies and major programming languages including Python, Rust, Go, Zig, and Wasm. Tune into his weekly Dev with Serdar videos for programming tips and techniques and close looks at programming libraries and tools.

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