CoreOS, Supermicro Partner on Web-Scale Servers for Enterprises

At its CoreFest conference this week in San Francisco CoreOS revealed it has formed partnerships with Supermicro and Redapt through which white box servers based on the latest generation of Intel processors will be certified to run the company’s distribution of Linux.

Aimed primarily at enterprise IT organizations that are looking to move away from commercial server platforms in favor of lower-cost white-box servers, CoreOS CEO Alex Polvi says, enterprise IT organizations are starting to copy the data center architectures that companies such as Google have developed.

The rate at which enterprise IT organizations will embrace new data center platforms remains to be seen. Most of the usage of containers and microservices to date has been confined to application development projects running in the cloud.

But as more of those applications begin to find their way into production, it’s only a matter of time before many of them get deployed on private clouds inside enterprise data centers and hosting facilities. As that process occurs, Supermicro appears to be betting that enterprise IT organizations will simultaneously reevaluate IT infrastructure investments that were originally made to support an entirely different era of computing.

“IT organizations are moving to containers and microservices,” says Polvi. “We’re starting to change the way people think about infrastructure altogether.”

While the latest Tectonic release of CoreOS is not yet generally available, it’s already clear that organizations are looking for server platforms that are much simpler to manage, Polvi adds. To that end, Tectonic embeds Google’s open source Kubernetes framework for container management in CoreOS to make it’s simpler to manage and orchestrate containers.

As part of that effort CoreOS is also moving to make sure the security frameworks surrounding those containers is robust enough to support production applications environments.

Under the terms of the alliance, Supermicro will work with Intel to develop a pre-built rack, while Redapt will provide systems-integration expertise.

Beyond simply copying the data center architectures used by large-scale web companies, enterprise IT organizations are also looking to employ more automation across converged sets of IT infrastructure. CoreOS has been working with Intel on implementing a software-defined infrastructure architecture for the data center.

As defined by Intel, that architecture consists of an orchestration layer to manage workloads, a composition layer to manage configurations and performance, and a hardware pool that keeps track of physical hardware resources. At the same time, Intel has extended its Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) to include support for Trusted Compute Pools (TCP) that better isolate application workloads.