Mesosphere launches first data centre OS
Tue 9 Dec 2014
Mesosphere, the startup famed for its distributed system expertise and support of the Apache Mesos project, has this week announced that its first data centre operating system is set to launch early next year.
Along with the launch of the new data centre operating system, DCOS, Mesosphere has also released that it has raised $36mn in a funding round led by Khosla Ventures, bringing its total funding to $50mn.
The operating system will manage infrastructure complexities inside a data centre by coordinating all of the machines and reading them as if they were one super computer. In a similar fashion to an operating system on a personal computer, which delivers required resources to the installed applications, the DCOS will be able to replicate the same process across an entire data centre estate.
In an essay Benjamin Hindman, Apache Mesos co-creator and new Mesosphere recruit, explained that a complete data centre operating package is crucial to keep pace with today’s applications and services which are becoming increasingly sophisticated, spanning multiple servers, like Cassandra, Kafka, and Spark.
“Today’s applications and services have outgrown single servers […] The data centre needs an operating system. The Mesosphere DCOS automates common operations and makes your entire data centre programmable,” said Florian Leibert, CEO and co-founder of Mesosphere.
“85 percent of a data centre’s capacity is typically wasted,” said Matt Trifiro, Mesosphere’s senior vice president of marketing and business development. He explained that despite efforts to coordinate data centre operations, up until now there has not been central operational control which can effectively connect and manage all the machines.
“We’ve always been talking about it — this vision […] Slowly but surely the pieces came together; now is the first time we are showing the total picture,” said Leibert.
The DCOS will consist of a bundle of Mesosphere products, including the Mesos resource management system, the Marathon framework, and the Chronos job planner, as well as other applications such as Hadoop and YARN.
The new operating system will also offer a range of standard OS features normally found in Windows or Linux, such as a user interface and a software development kit, which Leibert underlined as OS essentials.
“We basically turn the software developer into a data centre programmer,” said Leibert.
The DCOS has been released as private beta, however Leibert has not revealed which organisations are currently trialling the system. The CEO suggested that banks and financial services were a major target, whose data centres are generally less efficient legacy facilities with complex analytic workloads.
For those businesses with strict regulations, Leibert emphasised that security had been a top priority in creating the DCOS fabric.
“We built a security product into this operating system that is above and beyond any open-source system, even as a commercial plugin,” said Leibert.
The Mesosphere DCOS will be generally available in early 2015. Organisations interested in trialling the system pre-release can register here.
