Provision SLES on Bare Metal (including Raspberry Pi) – Fast!

I went to StackiFest17 this week in San Francisco, where in just one amazing day I received a crash course on Bare Metal Provisioning and became a huge fan of Stacki, the industry’s fastest bare metal provisioning platform made by StackIQ.

The big news is that StackIQ announced the availability of a new major release of their software – Stacki Pro 4.0 – which includes support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP2. Stacki Pro is the full-featured commercial version of Stacki that assists in the automation and management of hardware infrastructure within a data center. Stacki Pro make bare metal provisioning scalable and easy for high performance, enterprise workloads with the ability to deploy thousands of nodes in minutes.

StackIQ has its roots in Rocks, the open source cluster management software which is the defacto industry standard for managing high performance compute clusters. In 2006, two of the original authors of Rocks started StackIQ to bring automated bare metal solutions to the enterprise and created a new open source project Stacki. Today, StackIQ has more than 150 paying customers and over 2000 community members, a 10x growth since Jan 2016. More than 1 million Linux servers are under Stacki management.

Stacki solves the problem of bare metal provisioning at scale for compute, storage, and network. As fast as public cloud usage has grown, today most workloads still run in private data centers.  Use cases for Stacki include data intensive apps like big data, which requires the raw power of bare metal in addition to automation to manage the provisioning of large clusters of servers. Many of the largest big data deployments worldwide are managed by Stacki based on its reputation as a very fast and ultra-reliable Linux server provisioning tool that takes systems from bare metal to a cluster-ready base install.

Beyond big data, Stacki use cases include appliance production, container provisioning and management, hyperscale server deployment and DevOps. In fact, many customers add bare metal automation to their DevOps environment and integrate with their existing tools such as Ansible, Chef, Puppet, and Salt.

At StackiFest, Anthony Chen from Teradata presented how Teradata includes SUSE Linux Enterprise Server in their hyperscale appliances, and uses Stacki in their continuous integration/continuous deployment infrastructure to stage systems for all levels of testing, as well as stage all customer systems in manufacturing. Stacki allows them to significantly reduce effort, configure entire racks and quickly get to a “ping and a prompt” where they can continue testing.

And here’s something really cool. You already know about SUSE Linux Enterprise Server support for Raspberry Pi. This week, StackIQ also announced Stacki “Ace” for ARM processors which allows the Stacki management server to be installed on a Raspberry Pi removing the need for a dedicated X86 server for cluster installs using Stacki. Stacki can also provision Raspberry Pi nodes allowing mixed cluster installs with Raspberry Pis and X86 servers.

You can download a trial of the Stacki Pro 4.0 software for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 here.

There’s a lot to like about where StackIQ is heading, and we hope to do some great things together around server, container and even Raspberry Pi provisioning as the SUSE-StackIQ partnership grows. Stay tuned!