Mirantis is the latest OpenStack player to unveil a hardware product, on Wednesday launching a line of converged infrastructure appliances incorporating its distribution of the open source cloud architecture.

Called Mirantis Unlocked Appliances, the new infrastructure blocks combine hardware from Juniper and Dell with Mirantis' OpenStack distro. Systems integration firm Redapt will build and deliver the units as the first channel partner, with plans to add additional channel partners in the works.

Pricing for the appliances starts at $250,000 for a block, one-third of an equipment rack in height, running six compute nodes and three storage nodes, for a total capacity of up to 192 virtual machines. The one-time fee includes three years of Dell hardware support and one year of software support from Mirantis.

Mirantis' newfound alliance with Dell and Juniper follows a breakdown in its previous partnership with Red Hat, which was once an investor in Mirantis but has its own Red Hat OpenStack product integrated with an enterprise Linux distro.

"Red Hat has their own software agenda above and below OpenStack," Jim Sangster, senior director of solutions marketing at Mirantis, tells SDxCentral. "We're going to be building this ecosystem without having that hindrance of a strong opinion on the technology above and below."

Red Hat did not immediately respond to request for comment.

The new offering from Mirantis will compete with a similar OpenStack appliance from Breqwatr, which is sold as a subscription service starting at $15,000 per month.

It all adds up to an apparent shift in the enterprise private cloud market, away from software-only products and toward easily consumable OpenStack hardware appliances.

"OpenStack today is going mainstream," says Jim Sangster, senior director of solutions marketing at Mirantis. "But it still does require engineering services to get it going."

"We want to simplify that for customers to give them a very rapid deployment."