Why has open source become such a big deal, even in the enterprise data center? If you answered “to save money”, you wouldn’t be in the minority. But, despite what many may assume, it’s not principally about cost savings – although that may be one benefit. The attraction of open source is in its name – that is, its ‘open’ nature, both in terms of access to the code and to the developers who maintain and enhance it.
To boil it down, open source enables you to run data centers through software, with better and easier integration opportunities between diverse systems than has ever been possible before with proprietary offerings.
Open Source Advantages for the Modern Data Center
[table id=5 /]
Emerging open source infrastructure software thrives on freedom, flexibility, innovation and integration. Integration is particularly important because it enables discrete components to seamlessly work together as a system. This software thrives through community involvement, and the ability to integrate with both modern and existing processes and infrastructure, which leads to quicker adoption.Enterprises are looking to data center IT transformations to help them meet the ever-growing and fluid expectations of their customers. Key to this is establishing a modern data center strategy, specifically one that is optimized for resource consumption. By embracing systems that are operated as software, organizations are more readily able to adapt to changing demands and opportunities.
{code} is Dell’s open source initiative to deepen ties with the developer and open source communities. Through {code}, Dell is enabling these communities to seamlessly fuse proprietary software with open source technologies.
Leveraging Container-Focused Solutions
Containerization is having its big moment in the world of enterprise IT – specifically with open source infrastructure and application platforms, such as Docker, Mesos, Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes. Container-based infrastructure represents a major evolution in the way applications are deployed and managed. Not since the appearance of the virtual machine has a technology been so transformative. Containers give IT more choice of infrastructure, since it gives teams greater control over application dependencies, which enables them to adopt more agile operational methods.
However, a big challenge for fully adopting container technology is that it’s not a one-to-one comparison to virtual machines. With containers, how can users run persistent applications inside of these lightweight, ephemeral constructs? We believe this is a key challenge that prevents the wider adoption of container-based infrastructure.
REX-Ray: Meeting the Persistent Storage Challenge
To solve for this challenge, {code} has been working for more than a year on developing REX-Ray to deliver persistent storage capabilities to container run times. It provides a simple and focused architecture for enabling advanced storage functionality across common storage, virtualization and cloud platforms. As an open source project, new features and functionality continue to be added to REX-Ray, aimed at continuing to lead and set the bar for providing persistence capabilities to containers.
Storage is a critical element of any IT environment. By focusing on storage within the context of open source and software, we’re able to offer users more functionality, choice and value from their deployments. One solution that works really well with REX-Ray is Dell’s ScaleIO software-defined block storage.
REX-Ray and ScaleIO: Simpler Block Storage for Containerization
REX-Ray acts as the ‘glue’ between the container platform and ScaleIO – a software-defined storage solution that provides block level storage services on commodity hardware. This solution enables IT to move beyond purely stateless applications for containers, to confidently deploying critical stateful applications in containers as well.
ScaleIO is the gold standard for software-defined block storage platforms. It gives organizations the flexibility and freedom to provide storage through commodity servers in a range of deployment models – including hyper-converged architectures without a performance overhead. Through the seamless integration between REX-Ray and ScaleIO, the complete life cycle of storage is managed and consumed by container solutions such as Docker, Mesos, Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes.
Through {code}, Dell has demonstrated its commitment to support the open source community. By ensuring that its software-defined storage solutions such as ScaleIO work seamlessly within a modern data center (which already integrates wide-ranging technologies such as virtualization, containerization, automation and cloud) and DevOps environment, we are making software-based storage technologies relevant in the open source community. Advanced integration, developer enablement and dynamic engagement all made possible by {code} are making ScaleIO an increasingly valued and attractive block storage option for the open source community.
Learn more about {code} by Dell.
Want to get your hands a little dirty with the technology?
Download and test ScaleIO inside a VM environment.
Request a vLab demo:
Docker, Mesos, and ScaleIO for your persistent applications.
