The networking part of the OpenStack ecosystem remains fragmented and needs someone to step up and bring things together, according to Midokura. So the four-year-old network virtualization company is open sourcing its MidoNet technology.

“We want to solidify and unify the networking community around OpenStack with this solution,” Dan Conde, Midokura’s director of products, said.

MidoNet, he said, is a stable, scalable, easy to deploy, and fully open virtual networking solution on which anyone can innovate. It leverages an Apache 2 license, which is used under OpenStack; can run on any hardware; and functions well in production environments, he added. And the open sourced MidoNet is provided by Midokura, a company that has long been aligned and involved with the OpenStack ecosystem and the open source community,Conde said.

Juniper Networks (News - Alert) is the only company that offers a solution that is comparable, he added. But Conde said that Juniper has not done a good job of being an open source partner because it’s difficult to get and download what Juniper offers; the company has an important incentive to steer customers toward using its own hardware; and Juniper’s Contrail is more of a Layer 2 system, so it’s misaligned with the OpenStack Networking Neutron API.

“So we want to avoid that mistake,” Conde said.

Midokura is open sourcing Layer 2 switching; Layer 3 routing; Layer 4 services like firewall, load balancing, and NAT; and providing the ecosystem with a CLI; docs, deployment tools, automated testing infrastructure, and packages; OpenStack integration; a QuickStart environment; and a RESTFUL API. The source code is available at github.com/midnet and the community site is live at midonet.org. Already, 8x8, Bit-isle, Canonical, Eucalyptus, Fujitsu, IDC Frontier, KVH, Mellanox (News - Alert) Technologies, Mirantis, NIMBOXX, Red Hat, Solinea, Stratoscale, suse, and zetta.io have lined up behind the effort.

“By using MidoNet you can choose a system that is open, and use an API that is common along many platforms,” Conde said, adding that other APIs can be islands.

Now that’s Midokura has made MidoNet open source, the company will rely on the MidoNet Manager, professional services including implementation assistance and performance tuning, support, and third-party certification and monitoring integration as its sources of income, said Conde, who compared the model to what Cloudera and Red Hat (News - Alert) do.

Midokura enterprise MidoNet is priced at $1,899 per host per year. That includes a one-year annual software and support subscriptions, MidoNet Manager, and database clusters. The company also offers a Quickstart Bundle for $10,000, which has five hosted installed, and includes six month software and support subscriptions, as well as three days of professional services.

Juniper Networks a year ago in September announced the availability of Contrail through an open source license. Contrail, which is compatible with CloudStack and OpenStackplatforms, includes an analytics engine, SDN controller, and vRouter and is integrated with Juniper’s Firefly Perimeter virtual firewall, the company said at the time.