I’m proud to announce the release of OpenDCRE v1.1.0 today.  OpenDCRE is an API and infrastructure for data center monitoring and management that runs on a Raspberry Pi, and operates at the scope of a single rack.  OpenDCRE allows you to ditch your out-of-band (OOB) management network, and instead use power line communications (PLC) over a DC bus bar as the main data transport mechanism.  This particular aspect of OpenDCRE is very exciting, as it represents a novel contribution to the management and monitoring space, as well as a shift away from expensive networking gear and baseboard management controllers (BMCs).

That said, my team has also built a “bridge” to allow the OpenDCRE REST API to support existing IPMI infrastructure.  You simply configure OpenDCRE to talk to your BMCs, and you’re off to the races.

The process of building OpenDCRE has been a long and enjoyable one for my team and me.  Development work started earlier this year, and has accelerated, as we focused on quality, hardware integration and features.  In addition, we have developed a lightweight Linux distribution, named OpenMistOS, that runs on the Raspberry Pi, and includes Docker support, as well as customizations to support our hardware work.  Finally, we also developed a demonstration UI application that is included with OpenMistOS/OpenDCRE, that allows for visual and point-and-click monitoring and management, and can serve as a good starting point for developers wishing to build more robust applications atop OpenDCRE.

OpenDCRE v1.1.0 is only the beginning of the development process of OpenDCRE – I encourage you to consider joining the OpenDCRE community – not just as a user of the software, but also as a contributor.  We look forward to your pull requests, issues, and feature suggestions.  It is our mission to help make OpenDCRE continue to be the most modern, flexible and easy-to-use API for data center management and monitoring, and we’re very excited to share it with the broader community today.

Check out the OpenDCRE GitHub repo at https://github.com/vapor-ware/OpenDCRE – you can also download OpenMistOS from the Vapor IO web site at https://www.vapor.io/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/OpenMistOS-v1.0.0.img.tar.gz,  and be sure to check out the OpenDCRE Wiki at http://wiki.opendcre.com.

And of course, please feel free to reach out to me at andrew@vapor.io with any feedback, comments or questions.