Mirantis has enlisted a couple of manufacturers to build its OpenStack appliances, bringing a white-box touch to the concept.

Supermicro announced today that it plans to offer a pre-assembled rack that includes Arista Networks switches. Quanta Cloud Technology (QCT) will likewise offer a rack, to be called QxStack, with switches running Cumulus Networks software; that announcement is due to come out on Thursday, a Mirantis spokesman says.

Both are Taiwanese manufacturers known for building white-box servers and, more recently, switches. The first version of the Mirantis Unlocked Appliances, announced last summer, used networking hardware from Juniper and servers from Dell — and the Mirantis OpenStack distribution, of course.

The appliances are meant to ease the complexity of implementing OpenStack, which consists of dozens of projects, most of which are not required for every deployment. In other words, "using OpenStack" means thumbing through the project options — Nova for compute instances, Neutron for networking, Magnum for container support, and so on — and gluing them together to form a cloud management system.

The DIY approach has suited early adopters. But as OpenStack approaches mainstream acceptance, Mirantis thinks this OpenStack-in-a-box approach will catch on, eventually consuming 20 to 25 percent of OpenStack budgets.

The idea has caught on with at least a couple of startups: ZeroStack, founded by former VMware engineer Ajay Gulati, and Breqwater, which offers an appliance that delivers an OpenStack managed service.