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April 26, 2017

StackIQ Announces Availability of Stacki 4.0

SOLANA BEACH, Calif., April 26, 2017 — StackIQ, makers of one of the industry’s fastest bare metal provisioning platform, Stacki, today announced the availability of a new major release of their software, Stacki 4.0. Stacki 4.0 includes support for new platforms such as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12, Raspberry Pi and NetApp; new ease of use features; and updates to existing support for Kubernetes and Docker.

New platforms supported in Stacki 4.0 are:

  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 Service Pack 2 — Stacki Pro is now ported to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP2 and has been certified by SUSE. Customers can use Stacki Pro to provision nodes running the latest version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
  • Raspberry Pi provisioning (Requires Stacki “Ace” for ARM processors) — The Stacki management server can 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
  • New Advanced Storage Configurations — minimize manual steps involved in storage configurations such as
    • External Storage Array configuration for NetApp Arrays
    • Parallel Disk Formatting for rapid provisioning of storage hosts

New ease of use features in Stacki 4.0:

  • Advanced Hostfile parameters in spreadsheets including the ability to specify groups (e.g. dev, test, prod), boxes, run-action, and installation. These steps can now be indicated in the spreadsheet input improving intelligent management of the infrastructure.
  • GitHub integration and URL-based Pallets providing simple integration between Pallets developed and stored in GitHub and simple ingestion of Pallets from outside a cluster’s local network.
  • Stacki Pro UX Updates
    • Stacki UX now takes advantage of the Stacki Pro API. System admins can create multiple user accounts for the GUI with admins or non-admin permissions
    • Monitor temperature of CPUs for all nodes on your cluster
    • Global Utilization now provides dynamically updated data
    • GUI users can create Pallets from ISOs

Updates to existing features:

  • Enhancements to Kubernetes and Docker Pallets
    • TLS/SSL client and server encryption
    • Prometheus integration for monitoring and dashboards

Quotes:

“We are pleased to introduce the breadth of platform support and the improved ease of use features in Stacki 4.0,” said Tim McIntire, co-founder of StackIQ. “Users of Stacki can now utilize our sophisticated bare metal automation capabilities across SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Raspberry Pi and NetApp arrays in addition to our currently supported platforms.”

“We are delighted to welcome Stacki 4.0 into our certification program,” said Frank Rego, Director of ISV Partnerships at SUSE. “Stacki Pro and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 were certified in a customer’s rigorous real-world environment and are being used in their data centers around the world.”

Well over a million Linux servers are under management by Stacki, and its open source sibling, the Rocks Cluster Distribution (Stacki includes software developed by the Rocks Cluster Group at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, and its contributors).

Stacki 4.0 is ready for download and immediate use here

About Stacki

Open Source Stacki is a bare metal provisioning platform that is used by medium-sized and web scale enterprises to provision and manage bare metal clusters, some of which are as large as 3000+ nodes. Provisioning hundreds or thousands of nodes with Stacki’s parallel installer takes the same ease and nearly the same speed as provisioning one node.

Stacki Pallets contain software packages and code that run on the Stacki framework along with specialized installation and configuration information about applications such as Kubernetes and Hortonworks. Application Pallets are open source and are developed by the community as well as by StackIQ.

Stacki Pro is the commercial version of Stacki that includes support for additional Linux distributions, external storage platforms, an easy to use GUI, and dedicated support from the StackIQ engineering team. Stacki Pro enables customers to go from bare metal to a running application in a single step with full stack automation.

About StackIQ

StackIQ, the company that develops and supports Stacki, is venture-backed and was founded by some of the original developers of the Rocks Cluster Distribution at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. StackIQ helps customers automate the provisioning and management of small to large bare metal environments for a variety of use cases including big data, container deployment, building appliances, data center automation and private cloud automation. To date, the company has helped over 150 organizations automate over 1 Million Linux servers thereby saving over 560 years worth of manual installation and configuration tasks.


Source: StackIQ

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