Building on its commitment to deliver major new contributions in the open source community, EMC has introduced RackHD™ (Rack ‘H’ ‘D’), a platform-agnostic technology stack designed to solve an industry-wide challenge of managing and orchestrating server and network resources at hyper-scale. Additionally, the CoprHD™ Community announced the release of CoprHD 2.4 and new collaborations with Intel and Oregon State University, marking a significant community milestone as CoprHD grows beyond a single-vendor open source project. Lastly, EMC also announced new updates to Project REX-Ray™, its open source storage orchestration engine for use with containers provided by Docker, Mesos and others.
RackHD API Available to Developers
RackHD software offers hardware management and orchestration (M&O) that automates discovery, description, provisioning and programming across a broad range of servers today and a roadmap to add networking devices in the future.
Modern data centers are a mix of multi-vendor storage, networking and servers with an increasing variety of Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) hardware being used for powering hyper-scale use cases. Installing low-level operating systems or updating firmware and BIOS across numerous devices is already a cumbersome manual task for data center engineers and becomes orders of magnitude more difficult and costly at hyper-scale. RackHD was created to automate and simplify these fundamental tasks across a broad range of data center hardware.
Developers can use the RackHD API as a component in a larger orchestration system or create a user interface for managing hardware services regardless of the underlying hardware in place. It is designed to help organizations accelerate deployment of modern (Platform 3) applications that rely on large numbers of commodity servers and heterogeneous infrastructure.
Today RackHD supports a wide variety of Intel® proessor-based datacenter servers and discovery and monitoring for switches. A RackHD project community has been established through EMC {code}, the Community Onramp for Developer Enablement, to encourage contributions that will extend heterogeneous device support as well as to develop useful new features for the Software-Defined data center. A detailed list of features is available on the RackHD Project community page on GitHub: https://github.com/RackHD
CoprHD Community Releases CoprHD 2.4
CoprHD is open source storage automation software that centralizes and transforms multi-vendor storage into a simple and extensible platform. The CoprHD Community made its first official release with CoprHD 2.4 to include new features, projects, community contributors and a new licensing switch to Apache License, Version 2.0. The new release expands the scope of CoprHD to include EMC® ECS™ object storage, as well as a new REST API for EMC XtremIO® 4.0 software. A detailed list of features and supported platforms is available on the Project CoprHD community: https://coprhd.github.io/
Intel and Oregon State University joined the CoprHD Community as the newest contributors. Intel is leading a project to integrate Keystone with CoprHD, allowing the use of the Cinder API and/or the CoprHD API to provide block storage services. This feature allows organizations to provide a single storage management interface with CoprHD for their OpenStack services.
In an effort to further expand the CoprHD ecosystem, the CoprHD Community has developed a southbound Software Development Kit (SDK) designed to allow storage vendors and other third parties to more easily add support for other storage systems to CoprHD. Students at Oregon State University are developing the first plugin using the SouthBound SDK for a new EMC ScaleIO® driver. This will eventually replace the ScaleIO driver in the current release and will serve as a test case for further development of the SouthBound SDK.
EMC {code} Updates REX-Ray Storage Orchestration Engine
EMC also announced a new release of its REX-Raystorage orchestration engine. REX-Ray is an open source project driven by EMC {code} that delivers persistent storage access for container runtimes including those provided by Docker, Mesos and others. It is designed to enable advanced storage functionality across common storage, virtualization and cloud platforms.
The 0.3 release contains a variety of new updates through community contribution including expanded storage platform support for GCE (Google Compute Engine) as well as EMC Isilon® and EMC VMAX® storage systems. Additionally, REX-Ray has been updated with a pre-emptive volume mount function that enables the host to reassign mounted volumes from non-responsive hosts. This ensures applications maintain access to persistent storage.
