StackIQ, Inc., makers of the Warehouse-grade automation platform for any large-scale server infrastructure, today announced the release of open source Stacki (short for “Stack Installer”), the world’s fastest and easiest-to-use Linux server provisioning tool. With Stacki, there are zero prerequisites for taking systems from bare metal to ‘a ping and a prompt.’ Alongside this new release, the company made available a one-day, on-site Stacki training and an implementation service for users who want to use the tools immediately for production servers.

“We received a ton of feedback that the initial provisioning of bare metal scale-out servers is very time consuming and error prone. In particular, the automated RAID configuration and disk partitioning functionality Stacki now brings was called out as a major missing link in today’s toolchain for IT operators,” states Tim McIntire, CEO and Co-founder, StackIQ. “Regardless of the plethora of tools used for configuration management and application layer orchestration, organizations need a straightforward solution for what is effectively ‘Step Zero’ automation. As early evidence of that customer pull, over 100 enterprise users had already signed up for our pre-release Stacki Charter Program, which allows their production bare metal installation projects to be supported and recognized as a priority for StackIQ.”

StackIQ initiated this open source project with the goal of providing systems administrators with an easy-to-use tool to install Linux at blazing speed. Stacki comes complete with bare metal-to-functional-server installation and seamlessly ties into an organization’s systems management and configuration tools. Stacki also comes with a set of extensibility features that help administrators customize installs to make deploying special-purpose servers quick and easy. Designed to work within environments, not take over environments, Stacki will drive initial installation time down dramatically, giving time and IT Ops resources back to teams to pursue other higher value priorities.

Stacki is a parallel, package-based installer for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its derivatives such as CentOS, Oracle Linux, and Scientific Linux.

Stacki Highlights:

  • Full service DNS/DHCP server available from the Stacki host on first boot
  • Installations via PXE, using automatically configured TFTP
  • Parallel execution – all commands issued in Stacki can be run simultaneously on multiple machines
  • Host-level network configuration
  • Manage multiple distributions – so installations can be customized (g., Dev, Test, Prod)
  • Host assignment or discovery – tell Stacki what hosts to use, or tell it to grab the next machine to boot on a subnet
  • Partition configuration – set your partitions up how you want them, or let Stacki run with defaults
  • Storage Controller Configuration – Stacki will configure hardware RAID arrays with a default setting or you can provide Stacki with detailed RAID array configuration information
  • Parameterized installs – no “golden images” to track

StackIQ has seen significant growth and large-scale commercial adoption for its flagship product, StackIQ Boss:

  • Over a million Linux server nodes are under management by StackIQ Boss and its open source sibling the Rocks Cluster Distribution (Stacki and StackIQ Boss include software developed by the Rocks Cluster Group at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, and its contributors).
  • 150 enterprises, service providers, and leading research universities use StackIQ Boss to fully automate scale-out clustered servers
  • Pre-built application configuration packs for StackIQ Boss (called Pallets) automate some of the largest enterprise Hadoop initiatives in the world

Stacki is an open source software project. Contributions, questions, and comments are encouraged by and for the community. End users and developers are invited to visit the resources below for information and to download Stacki for immediate use.