Dell EMC and Mesosphere released a reference architecture that uses Mesosphere’s data center operating system (DC/OS) software with container support and Dell EMC software and hardware.

Using this technology, the companies say, will allow enterprises to create a public-cloud like environment on-premise, thus enabling benefits like elasticity and speedy application deployment, with the security and control of an on-site data center.

The reference architecture combines Dell EMC's ScaleIO Ready Nodes — the combination of ScaleIO software-defined block storage and Dell PowerEdge servers — Mesosphere DC/OS, and REX-Ray container storage orchestration. Mesosphere DC/OS is the commercial version of the Apache Mesos container management platform and an alternative to Kubernetes.

These combined technologies enable customers to build and run modern applications that use containers and big data services within their on-premise infrastructure, said Barry Evans, Mesosphere’s VP enterprise ecosystem.

“This makes the technology more accessible to a broader range of customers,” Evans said. “It makes it more digestible on the frontend without having to guess the best way to implement this new emerging technology: the cloud-native approach and container-based microservices.”

It’s a better choice for enterprises than public cloud services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) because it gives customers the flexibility of cloud services, including the ability to rapidly develop and deploy applications, while also allowing customers to run these application on-site, he said.

Mesosphere customers include Verizon, Autodesk, Esri, and Wellframe.

Plus, it means they can avoid public cloud lock-in: being stuck in a lengthy contract with a cloud services provider to the tune of millions or even billions of dollars, Evans added.

Of course, the benefits of a public cloud without the related risk seems to be the promise of every new management and orchestration platform launched these days.

Evans acknowledged this but said “we’re different.”

“We’re more than just container orchestration, container management,” he added. “We also have the capability to launch data services and manage those. You can launch those with a single click through DC/OS and Universe, our repository. Not only can you place your Docker container and manage it in the infrastructure, you can also build out a fast data pipeline.

The other ingredient in Mesosphere’s special sauce is Mesos’ two-level scheduler. This means it has an ordinary scheduler, atop which developers add application-specific schedulers.

“This really unlocks the bottlenecks to scale, so you can run hundreds or thousands of nodes in a cluster and manage the resource allocation and grow parts of different applications in your cluster, or shrink them, all without limits on the expanse of that,” Evans said. “That is what we mean when we say public cloud-like services: it’s very easy to launch and attach a data base to your data pipeline.”

Mesosphere and Dell EMC have partnered on products and projects in the past. Last year, Mesosphere integrated REX-Ray by {code} — Code, a Dell EMC project, stands for community onramp for developer enablement — a container storage orchestration engine to manage storage from multiple platforms, in DC/OS.

In addition to being another sign of enterprises’ preference for cloud-native applications and infrastructures within their own data centers, the new reference architecture also shows how original equipment manufacturers like Dell EMC are responding to customers’ wants for “technologies for the masses,” Evans said.

“They need it to be simple, they need it to work, and they need it to get to the development efforts that are most tied to their value proposition,” he explained. “They don’t want to build it; they want to play with it. They don’t want Lego blocks; they want the Millennium Falcon. Dell EMC sees that. They built the Millennium Falcon, so now you can play with it instead of designing it.”