Brocade Communication Systems is doubling down on OpenStack. On Thursday the company had two announcements relating to the increasingly prominent open source cloud platform: a technical partnership with pure-play OpenStack startup Mirantis, and the OpenStack Foundation seal of approval for its VDX and SAN product families.

The Mirantis partnership will give Brocade customers who implement OpenStack access to Mirantis services and support, and marks the first time the Mirantis OpenStack distribution has formally certified Brocade's OpenStack plugin, according to Brocade Director of Product Management Ken Ross.

"A lot of customers are kicking the tires on OpenStack and doing trials," Ross told SDxCentral. As enterprises take the platform into production, he added, "we think it's really valuable for them to have a fully supported OpenStack distribution."

Separately, Brocade announced its VDX switches and storage area network products now have the "OpenStack Compatible" certification mark from the OpenStack Foundation.

"Customers have been much more receptive to leveraging open source," said Ross. "They want to take advantage of the broader community effort, and they also want to have vendor independence."

Asked if increased vendor independence could come back to bite Brocade, Ross said the company's emphasis on open source was a strategic move to get in front of inevitable disruption.

"We don't necessarily need to rely on proprietary hooks moving forward," he said.

Speaking of Mirantis, the company also announced Thursday that it would release a free edition of OpenStack Express for developers. After a 12-month free trial, the price jumps to $39.99 monthly.

With the "try now, no risk!" model, Mountain View, Calif.-based Mirantis is hoping to expose its distribution to ever more developers in an effort to rapidly build out the ecosystem around it.

"The success of OpenStack is all about the solutions running on top of it," Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel said in a statement. "Hundreds of thousands of developers are now familiar with cloud services, and we want to enable them to ride the wave of OpenStack adoption."