Mesosphere and Cisco Partner on Turnkey Data Center Platform for Open Source Tech

Looking to make it simpler for IT organizations of all sizes to embrace emerging open source technologies like Apache Spark, Kafka, Cassandra, and Akka, Mesosphere, today unveiled the first in a series of turnkey platforms based on its Datacenter Operating System.

Developed in collaboration with Cisco, the Mesosphere Infinity platform makes use of Mesosphere DCOS to provide a higher level of abstraction that enables IT organizations to deploy complex technologies via a single click, Mesosphere CEO Florian Leibert said. The end result is an unprecedented level of data center efficiency in terms of both scale and manageability, according to him.

“We can now manage 10,000 servers using a single engineer,” said Leibert. “The previous industry average was somewhere between 100 to 500 servers.”

Aimed at IT organizations looking for ways to deploy complex open source technologies and drive a new generation of Big Data and Internet of Things applications, Mesosphere Infinity is built around DCOS, which in turn is based on open source Apache Mesos cluster manager software, originally developed at the University of California at Berkeley.

Infinity takes that data center operating system concept to the next logical level by identifying all the deployment and operational complexities associated with packaging all key component services into a single interoperable stack. That stack can then be deployed in the cloud or on-premise, using either the community edition of Mesosphere or the commercially-supported distribution that Mesosphere sells to enterprise IT organizations. If one server crashes, Liebert said, Infinity automatically redeploys the stack on the elements of the cluster that are available.

While the first instance of Infinity will initially focus on IoT and Big Data applications, Mesosphere plans to extend the reach and scope of the platform to other application scenarios as part of an effort to make DCOS more accessible to the average enterprise IT organization.

In addition to Cisco, Mesosphere has recruited partner support from Elodina, a provider of a Big Data as a service applications that is a leading contributor to the Apache Kafka messaging software project, Typesafe, a leading contributor to the Scala programming language in which Spark, Akka, and Kafka are all written, and Confluent, a provider of stream processing platform founded by the creators of the Kafka project.

For its part, Cisco is using these technologies to drive both internal projects as well as including them as foundational components within its hybrid Intercloud initiative.

While it’s unclear just yet how many organizations actually have the level of IT maturity needed to adopt Mesosphere Infinity, the one thing that is certain is that very few of them have the time or skills needed to manually configure complex clusters. As a result, Liebert said, the only way many of them will ever be able to deploy technologies such as Spark and Kafka is to embrace a higher level of abstraction that automates the process.

Mesosphere is reportedly in acquisition talks with Microsoft.