Deep and Active Support
Unlike the open source projects below, RackN is a licensed software product. That means we treat customer support for operations and bare metal as a first-class product feature. Our revenue comes from our software’s utility, not services or support.
And we win on features.
No other system on the market provides the integrated capabilities of the RackN Digital Rebar Platform (DRP). Our unique infrastructure as code (IaC) features enable a wide range of advanced use-cases such as multi-site management, dynamic out of band workflows (contexts), manage switches or storage appliances for air-gapped and edge deployments.
We deliver these features because only RackN takes a holistic bare metal management approach. Take us for a free self-service test drive and you’ll find that we are the simplest to use and most flexible data center automation platform available. In addition to the vast open Digital Rebar catalog, we’ve made 100% of the RackN extensions available to community users running labs up to 20 machines.
reddit.com/r/devops
| Class | Feature | RackN | Cobbler | Foreman | MaaS | Ironic |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| API | Ad Hoc (Pooled) Assignment | YES ✔ | no | no | YES ✔ | YES ✔ |
| Evented (WSS) | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| Integrated DHCP | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| Intent API | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| Secure API | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| Active Community | YES ✔ | no | no | no | YES ✔ | |
| Enterprise | Commercial Support | YES ✔ | no | YES ✔ | YES ✔ | YES ✔ |
| Highly Available | YES ✔ | no | no | YES ✔ | no | |
| Multi Tenant | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| RBAC with Views | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| SSO Integration | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| Flexible | Field Extensible | YES ✔ | no | YES ✔ | no | no |
| Metal and Cloud | YES ✔ | no | YES ✔ | no | no | |
| In-Field Configuration | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| Multi-OS | YES ✔ | Linux | Linux | Linux | YES ✔ | |
| Hardware | Automatic Classification | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no |
| Burnin and Decommission | YES ✔ | no | no | no | YES ✔ | |
| Integrate OOB / IPMI | YES ✔ | no | no | no | YES ✔ | |
| Integrated Inventory | YES ✔ | no | no | YES ✔ | YES ✔ | |
| Multi-Arch / Multi-Protocol | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| Switch Integration | YES ✔ | no | no | YES ✔ | YES ✔ | |
| Scale | Scale to 1,000s | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no |
| Advanced Evented UX | YES ✔ | no | no | YES ✔ | no | |
| Multi-Site Management | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| Multi-Site Federated Views | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| Self-Upgrading | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| Small footprint | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| Orchestration | Integrated Triggers | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no |
| Webhooks | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| Alert Subsystem | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| Cluster Lifecycles | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| Day 2 Mode | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| Modular IaC | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| Pipelines | One Process, Many Targets | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no |
| Firmware configuration | YES ✔ | no | no | no | YES ✔ | |
| Image deployment | YES ✔ | no | no | YES ✔ | YES ✔ | |
| Integrated Workflow | YES ✔ | no | no | no | YES ✔ | |
| Dynamic Contexts | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no | |
| Modular IaC | YES ✔ | no | no | no | no |
Don’t Take Our Word For It!
The Digital Rebar Platform speaks for itself. We encourage operators to download and test it!