Mesosphere Unveils Data Center Operating System Environment

Building Software-Defined Control for Your Data Center

Making the case that the time has come for building a more efficient way to manage data center environments, Mesosphere today announced what it is calling the first data center operating system (DCOS) that turns everything in the data center into a shared programmable resource.

Mesosphere CEO Florian Leibert says Mesosphere DCOS is based on an open source distributed Apache Mesos kernel project that turns virtual and physical IT infrastructure into a common pool of resources. At present, Mesosphere DCOS can be deployed on Red Hat, CentOS, Ubuntu and CoreOS distributions of Linux running on bare-metal servers or VMware or KVM virtual machine environments running on premise or in Amazon Web Services, Google, DigitalOcean, Microsoft, Rackspace and VMware cloud computing environments.

Liebert says it takes too much effort these days to deploy distributed computing applications. By abstracting away the underlying physical and virtual infrastructure, Mesosphere presents services and application programming interfaces (APIs) that ultimately serve to dramatically increase overall utilization of IT infrastructure.

Services included with Mesosphere DCOS include a distributed init system (Marathon), distributed cron (Chronos), service discovery (DNS), and storage (Hadoop Distributed File System) that are all exposed to application developers via a software development kit (SDK) that Mesosphere has developed. Mesosphere also supports the OpenStack cloud management framework and has created a public and private repository through which IT organizations can distribute third-party and custom-built data center services.

Liebert notes that the Mesos kernel is already being used by organizations such as Airbnb, Twitter and Hubspot. Mesosphere is now simply building an operating environment that makes that technology more accessible to the average IT organization, says Liebert.

Fresh off of raising $36 million of additional financing, Mesosphere is betting that as IT organizations look to embrace the software-defined data center (SDDC) as a concept, they will be more open to rethinking how the entire data center is operated. Rather than cobbling those environments together using individual services and scripts, Liebert says IT organizations making that transition will be looking for a more turnkey environment through which they can accomplish that goal.

In the months and years ahead, there’s no doubt that the way data centers are managed is going to be utterly transformed thanks to the rise of higher levels of management abstractions and greater reliance on IT automation. The challenge now is figuring out how to turn that vision of how the data center should operate into an actual everyday reality.