EMC Releases RackHD Open Source Project Available Under Apache License, V2.0

Building on its commitment to deliver major contributions in the open source community, EMC Corporation announced RackHD (Rack ‘H’ ‘D’), a platform-agnostic technology stack designed to solve the 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 Corp. and Oregon State University, marking a significant community milestone as CoprHD grows beyond a single-vendor open source project.Lastly, the company 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 OSs 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 variety of Intel processor-based datacenter servers and discovery and monitoring for switches. A RackHD project community has been established through the company, 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.

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. This release expands the scope of CoprHD to include company’s ECS object storage, as well as a REST API for XtremIO 4.0 software. A detailed list of features and supported platforms is available on the project CoprHD community.

Intel Corporation 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 plug-in 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.

Updates REX-Ray storage orchestration engine
The company also announced a release of its REX-Ray storage orchestration engine. REX-Ray is an open source project driven by the company 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 updates through community contribution including expanded storage platform support for GCE (Google Compute Engine) as well as Isilon and 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.

Availability

• The RackHD project is available under the Apache License, version 2.0 and is hosted on GitHub.

• CoprHD 2.4 is available under the Apache License, version 2.0 and is hosted at this link.

• REX-Ray 0.3 is available under the Apache License, version 2.0 and is hosted on GitHub.

James Watters, VP and GM, cloud platform business, Pivotal Software, Inc., said: “Through a partnership with the RackHD Project team, Pivotal can now enable bare metal and hybrid deployments for the first time. The power and adaptability of RackHD has allowed for a transition from concept to demonstration of technology in just two weeks with no changes to the core CloudFoundry code.“

Bev Crair, VP and GM, storage group, Intel, said: “End-user demands for flexible, reliable performance of IT services are driving a shift in the storage industry towards software-defined storage solutions. The CoprHD software-defined storage controller enables cloud platforms, such as OpenStack, to manage heterogeneous storage. This aligns with Intel’s commitment and contributions to the opensource community and our efforts to accelerate development of software-defined storage solutions.“

Shayne Huddleston, director, IT infrastructure, Oregon State University, said: “We discovered how difficult it was to implement any kind of automation tooling for a heterogeneous mix of storage systems. Collaborating with the CoprHD community will allow us to realize our goal of avoiding vendor lock-in and supporting our entire infrastructure.“

John Roese, SVP and CTO, EMC, said: “It’s an exciting time for EMC in this new development model where we have EMC employees developing code directly that can help solve big industry challenges while advancing new technologies in a way that everyone can participate in, contribute, criticize and collaborate. RackHD, CoprHD and REX-Ray are technologies that address significant challenges in the Software-Defined data center. We hope that by making these technologies open and accessible that our collective efforts with the development community will benefit a broad range of organizations and applications.“

Resources:
Read perspective on Pulse blog: EMC Continues Open Source Momentum with New RackHD Hardware M&O Layer
Read executive perspective on Reflections blog: RackHD: An Open Source Solution For A Hyper-Scale Problem
More information on EMC {code}