Verizon is Deploying Mesosphere's Data Center Operating System

Back in January, OStatic caught up with former Twitter lead engineer and Apache Mesos co-creator Ben Hindman, who has been leading the design of Mesosphere’s Data Center Operating System (DCOS), for an in-depth interview. "The number of machines that most enterprise are working with is growing, and so is the variety of services and frameworks they’re trying to run," Hindman said, as he described the need for a new type of operating system that can offer central administration of different platforms and tools.

Since then, DCOS has extended its reach, and Mesosphere Infinity has arrived, billed as "the first real-time enterprise-ready open source offering that lets companies capture the enormous new business opportunities created by the rise of ubiquitous data." Among the organizations choosing to go with DCOS is Verizon, which describes needs that seem to align well with Mesosphere's platform.

"Verizon is committed to unleashing the full potential of open source, data center cluster technology and cloud applications for the highest possible customer experience," said Kumar Vishwanathan, vice president and chief technologist for Verizon Labs, in an announcement. "Mesosphere DCOS gives Verizon the foundation to create far-reaching benefits by increasing our ability to quickly launch new products and services while reducing the IT requirements in our data centers."

With Mesosphere DCOS, Verizon Labs developers are seeking to operate the entire data center as a single cohesive entity. If they can, Verizon will be able to automatically scale services up and down to handle the dynamic needs of millions of customers.

According to the company: "Using a single DCOS interface, Verizon Labs teams can create rules and complex scripts to automate data center operations that enable an unprecedented level of automation throughout the data center. New services can be scaled up quickly using existing capacity and without manual configuration of resources because DCOS incorporates an elastic and highly scalable means that reduces up to 90 percent of the number of deployment cycles required to deploy new applications."

What other kinds of organizations should consider DCOS? Ben Hindman made the point to us that companies in need of more automation and higher utilization are good candidates:

"Humans will always have a role in the datacenter, but things should be more automated with common services. Automation enables us to be smarter about scheduling and resource allocation, helping us drive up utilization (which drives down costs) and better handle machine and hardware failures."

"Higher utilization is a key advantage of a datacenter operating system. If you’re in the cloud, you might be buying 8 core machines but only using 2 cores. Your cloud provider is really the one benefiting from virtualized resources, not you! The datacenter operating system enables you to more fully utilize your machines by automating the placement of your applications across your machines, using as many resources as it can per machine."

"Dealing with failures gets much easier with a datacenter operating system too. When you are running 2-3 machines dealing with failures is a pain, but you can usually track down and fix any issues within a small amount of time. But when you begin to scale to tens, then hundreds, then thousands of machines, dealing with failures becomes an expensive manual operation."

"Finally, a datacenter operating system enables developers, who traditionally have had to  interface with humans for access to machines, to develop and run their applications directly against datacenter resources via an API. Whether they’re claiming resources for existing applications or building new frameworks, the abstraction layer of the datacenter operating system makes it easier to build applications and share those applications across organizations."