Vapor IO Makes Case for Open Compute Project

2016 Software Trends: The Evolution of Enterprise Software

When it comes to data centers, many of the providers of hosting services often have proprietary hooks that, for all intents and purposes, wind up locking IT organizations into a specific facility. To address that issue, Vapor IO has created a Vapor Open Data Center Runtime Environment (OpenDCRE), an open RESTful application programming interface through which IT organizations can monitor and control equipment in a data center.

At the Open Compute Project Summit this week, Vapor IO announced that with the release of version 1.2 of OpenDCRE, it is now providing support for the Open Compute Project (OCP) led by Facebook, as well as servers from AppliedMicro and modular data center infrastructure from BASELAYER.

Vapor IO CEO Cole Crawford says the goal is to create a framework that eliminates the need to invest in Tier IV-class data centers because all the redundancy an IT organization needs can be provided via software modules accessing a common REST API.

Crawford says integration with OCP is critical because it’s the only open infrastructure platform designed to completely eliminate any and all opportunities for vendors to lock a customer into a particular product or technology.

While Crawford concedes that OCP momentum has been sluggish, he says it’s now only a matter of time before IT organizations begin to appreciate the flexibility that OCP and OpenDCRE provide. In the meantime, Crawford says, IT organizations should be wary of the agenda of hosting providers that tend to view investments in data center facilities more like a real estate transaction than an actual dynamic set of IT services.