EMC today announced details of RackHD (Rack Hardware Director), an open source project available under the Apache 2.0 license that delivers hyper-scale, multi-vendor hardware and network management and orchestration. By automating the management of fleets of servers, RackHD responds to the industry need to simplify the automation of heterogeneous assemblages of serves in the modern data center. RackHD can be used in collaboration with third party orchestration platforms to more effectively manage and automate the deployment of multi-vendor hardware deployments. The release of RackHD intends to elicit support from manufacturers of servers and network devices in an effort to build an open source standard for hyper-scale management of multi-vendor deployments of servers and networking devices. As such, the project underscores EMC’s commitment to open source technologies while concomitantly illustrating the acuity of EMC’s strategic vision in understanding the industry’s need for multi-vendor infrastructure management tools that can operate at the scale of 10,000 servers. In related news, the CoprHD community announced the release of CoprHD 2.4, a storage centralization and management platform that facilitates multi-vendor storage. The new version of CoprHD 2.4 features new support for EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) and EMC XtremIO 4.0. CoprHD solves the problem of multi-vendor management for the storage industry in ways that complement EMC’s vision for hyper-scale, multi-vendor management and automation as it relates to servers and networking devices via RackHD. All told, today’s announcements represent a landmark breakthrough in hyperscale infrastructure management given that EMC has now thrown its weight behind an open source project that intends to simplify hyper-scale mult-vendor hardware and networking management. As infrastructure deployments increase in size and complexity, expect offerings such as RackHD to garner increased support from the vendor community, particularly as the hybridity and heterogeneity of the contemporary data center intensifies the need for hyper-scale, multi-vendor management and orchestration.
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