UbunCanonical intros metal as a service

UbunCanonical has unveiled a metal as a service (MaaS) offering to provision and manage high-density Ubuntu micro-servers running hyper-scale computing centres and clouds, The Register reports.

The Linux shop claims MaaS will allow administrators to set up and allocate thousands of tightly-packed racks to different groups of users, adding the latest software without IT teams needing to physically visit each machine.

MaaS allows administrators to provision bare metal just by connecting the machine to the network, Cloud Pro writes.

The MaaS server then uses tools, such as PXE and TFTP, to boot the machine up using a small Ubuntu image. MaaS adds this machine to the general resource pool and sets of nodes can be assigned dynamically to form clusters for particular applications.

Administrators use a Web console to manage physical servers and can gain insight into the status of clusters and assess how much compute resources are available to deploy and how much is used already.

According to IT Pro Portal, founder Mark Shuttleworth said in a blog post that MaaS is set to bring agility back to hyper-scale deployments.

Whereas servers used to be big and powerful, Shuttleworth noted, in the hyper-scale era, more power can be added not via beefier nodes, but simply by adding more nodes to clusters.