Your infrastructure should be easy to manage, and outsourcing control to somebody else doesn’t have to be a foregone conclusion. We built RackN Digital Rebar to break the infrastructure as code barrier. Digital Rebar is infrastructure management software that provides distributed infrastructure as code (IaC) management for on-premises, edge, and cloud environments.
How does it work? Perhaps we need to start with why we built Digital Rebar.
RackN Infrastructure as Code History
We founded RackN 6 years ago. Our vision was to help operators work together to improve IT operations through shared software and community, regardless of the type of infrastructure being managed.
The vision began five years earlier, when our core team created an innovative open source project named Crowbar while at Dell. Crowbar was the first open installer for complex OpenStack and Hadoop platforms. While radical for 2009, Crowbar had too much hard coding and hidden dependencies to become a general purpose platform. The RackN founders used that shared experience to create a modular Infrastructure as Code (IaC) provisioning and configuration platform Digital Rebar.
The RackN team collectively has decades of data center operational experience. We used our experience to create easy to install software that still provides IT organizations a progressive path to full autonomy. Digital Rebar delivers automation in layers. This enables operations teams to adopt Digital Rebar into current processes, and then incrementally add autonomous and self-service features.
But RackN didn’t stop with redefining the on-premises provisioning experience.
RackN IaC addresses CXO Pain
While we built RackN to help operators do their work, we also built it to solve the pain of CXOs. CXOs care about more than day-to-day operations tasks such as provisioning and configuration. They have to have oversight and control of their entire IT estate!
We have heard from our customers that they need consistent processes everywhere that work with their current IT investments. When we talk to CXOs, they literally yell that nothing works together! They are frustrated that the business must wait months for infrastructure to come online. It doesn’t help that their teams are duplicating effort. Additionally, the integrations needed for digital transformation initiatives are fragile and locked-in.
CXOs want to eliminate IT silos in a way that provides them purchasing leverage with vendors. Managing data center fundamentals take too long and require too much effort. This keeps them from providing the benefits of digital transformation to their stakeholders.
It seems as if the best alternative may be to relinquish control of their operations to a cloud provider. However, giving up control brings new security and cost challenges.
CXOs need a faster and more secure way to manage their IT environments. In fact, at this point is an economic imperative. RackN IaC brings a missing automation layer to bring choices with which to address these concerns.
RackN Builds the Missing Automation Layer
How does RackN address CXO concerns? Digital Rebar is self-contained software that runs entirely inside your network. The extensible architecture pulls reusable modules from the RackN IaC catalog. This allows you to plug in API-integrations & user-extendable workflows to orchestrate multi-vendor infrastructure, giving you cloud-like flexibility.
Our heritage is improving the provisioning experience, but that’s just the foundation of what our software provides. Infrastructure as Code is a foundational component of the Digital Rebar Platform. The platform was designed around reusable, stackable modules that treat your infrastructure automation as code. RackN IaC creates the assembly line for your organization’s technology delivery.
RackN manages this IaC assembly line in a decentralized manner. This paves a way for IT organizations to create a distributed management system that connects multiple sites in a federated way, no matter if they are on-premises, in a cloud, or on an edge. RackN’s distributed management provides a way to make sure the IaC components stay synchronized across your IT estate.
Instead of cloud providers working behind the scenes for you, we’ve made an IaC automation layer available for any data center to run in a self-managed way. We give you the tools and power to run your own infrastructure using RackN Digital Rebar wherever you run your operations.
Try Digital Rebar and See for Yourself
Are you currently working out how components in your IT estate can fit together to create scalable, simple shareable patterns and practices? Try RackN Digital Rebar for yourself! Experience how it can help you automate your current operating model, as well as how it can help you plan for the future.
Is there an edge project in your future? Digital Rebar’s Edge Lab can help you get ready for that as well.
If you want to learn m ore, check out our YouTube videos, our DevOps Lunch and Learn and Cloud 2030 series, or our Cloud 2030 podcast. You can also chat with us on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Bottom Line
Digital Rebar IaC automates your data center operations into a complete and total system. Instead of taking away control like cloud providers, we’re giving it back! Our customers manage their own integrations for infrastructure hardware, platforms and cloud vendors. In fact, if you have a platform vendor or legacy hardware that is vital to your operations that isn’t in the RackN IaC library, we can work you to automate them.
Unlike a service, RackN focuses on customer independence. Our goal is to bring and improve common practices across the industry. Digital Rebar is our unified Infrastructure as Code platform for infrastructure and it makes operations simple to understand and reuse. We make infrastructure easy to own again.
How can we help you?
