Technology distributor Arrow ECS has adopted Mirantis’ OpenStack implementation, and will use it to offer open source cloud data centers to its service provider customers.

The OpenStack project provides an open source infrastructure-as-a-service platform as an alternative to more proprietary offerings of providers such as Amazon. Launched by NASA and Rackspace in 2010, it now has widespread industry support from vendors including Red Hat, Dell, HP, and IBM, although Amazon still dominates the market.

“OpenStack disaggregates the control plane of the data center,” Boris Renski, co-founder and CMO of Marantis told DCD. By making cloud platforms easier to build and manage, OpenStack should allow the market for cloud-based data centers to expand and diversify, Renski said.

Arrow’s customers include hundreds of managed service providers (MSPs), said Renski. These stand to benefit from OpenStack, which lets them offer a competitive service to Amazon, within their specialized markets.

Marantis hopes to establish a solid niche as a provider that only deals in OpenStack, and which is keen to work with all other vendors in the space, said Renski. He contrasted this approach with that of Red Hat, which aims to lead the OpenStack market.

Mirantis has partners including Canonical and Oracle, working with their Linux versions and preferred virtualization technologies, as well as with VMware and Microsoft’s virtualization technologies. Red Hat’s OpenStack implementation by contrast, is solidly built around Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and the company’s KVM hypervisor, and has a strong preference for Red Hat’s OpenShift management technology, said Renski.