Mesosphere’s Data Center OS to Get Power, Cooling Visibility

Mesosphere, the San Francisco-based startup behind the Data Center Operating System, has gotten a lot of attention – and funding – from the IT industry and venture capital heavyweights because of the way its software abstracts and orchestrates disparate IT resources and presents them as uniform pools of compute applications can use.

Based on open source Apache Mesos, DC/OS orchestrates bare-metal servers and VMs, regardless of where they are running, in a public cloud like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure or in the user’s own data center. It owes its wide appeal to the wide variety of resources it reaches, but it hasn’t had visibility into one important aspect of enterprise infrastructure: the physical data center resources underlying the IT.

A new partnership Mesosphere has reached with Vapor IO, an Austin-based data center technology startup founded, promises to change that. The two companies will integrate DCOS with Vapor’s OpenDCRE (Open Data Center Runtime Environment) software, which will give DCOS visibility into things like data center power and cooling resources applications consume, Vapor IO announced Wednesday.

Vapor IO was founded by Cole Crawford, former executive director of the Open Compute Project, the open source data center and hardware design community started by Facebook.

Taking things further, Mesosphere and Vapor IO plan to create a scheduler they say will give a user visibility into the cost of running a particular application on-premise or in a public cloud. Once they decide what type of environment is more cost-effective for that application, they will be able to use the scheduler, called Mist, to move the application to that environment.

Mist will work with applications that run in Linux containers, which will enable it to move workloads. Users will be able to orchestrate containers manually or automatically, Vapor IO said.

Both OpenDCRE and DC/OS are open source. Mesosphere open sourced its software this past April.

This is the second major technology integration Vapor IO announced this year. In March, the company said it was integrating its software and its atypical data center pod, called Vapor Chamber, with data center management software and data center modules by Chandler, Arizona-based Baselayer.