The data center of the future will be fully virtualized, with everything from power supplies to storage devices consolidated into a single pool and managed by software, according to an executive whose company intends to lead the way.

Florian Leibert, cofounder and CEO of hot Silicon Valley startup Mesosphere, Inc., said new applications will help drive the trend by assuming that a distributed and automated infrastructure is in place from day one. This concept goes beyond server virtualization, he said.  “The whole virtualization space is being disrupted,” Leibert told theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Jeff Frick in an interview at OpenStack Silicon Valley on Tuesday.  “We think what’s needed is an aggregation model, not a virtualization model. “

Ultimately, the data center will evolve to look like “one big computer,” he added. Mesosphere’s mission is “to build the operating system that runs on your entire data center.”

Founded just a year ago, Mesosphere has turned heads in Silicon Valley by raising more than $10.5 million in venture capital from blue-chip investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, as well as by signing up name brand customers like Airbnb, Inc. and Twitter, Inc. while also partnering with Google. The company is building a suite of open source infrastructure tools based on the Apache Mesos project that enables data centers to be virtualized at a massive scale.

Mesos itself is a game-changer, Leibert said. It enables developers to program “against resources rather than against individual machines,” he noted. “You can decide as a policy on a global level which application should get which resources.”

Twitter connection

Mesosphere grew out of a project at Twitter that sought to solve scalability issues by consolidating multiple services like search from individual machines into large servers. Google had already solved the problem with its own home-grown software, but an open source version wasn’t available. “We saw that we could solve the resource problems and increase utilization by 2X to 3X,” Leibert said. The company hired Benjamin Hindman, who was building Mesos while working on his Ph.D. at the University Of California Berkeley, to bring the technology to bear on the problem.

Now Mesosphere is bringing that same technology to market, targeting not only Internet companies but enterprises. “We want to automate a lot of the tasks that have to be done in your data center completely away for you and at the same time increase resources and utilization,” he said.

Mesosphere has plenty of company. Every major systems vendor is tackling the same problem, as are networking giants like Cisco Systems, Inc., storage kingpin EMC Corp. and a host of startups. Leibert declined to identify which competitors his company hopes to disrupt, preferring to emphasize Mesosphere’s compatibility with popular standards like OpenStack, Docker and Kubernetes.

Drawing an analogy between Mesosphere and Docker, he complimented the container technology for having done  “a great job of figuring out how to package applications in its file format, but if you just have a Docker container, there’s not much you can do with it,” he cautioned. Mesosphere’s approach is to implement containerization “at a massive scale.”

Leibert predicted that the infrastructure market will consolidate as more commodity components move into the data center. And there’s still a lot left to virtualize. He sees power supplies as an exciting opportunity. “Today, every rack has its own power supply, but in the future you’ll be able to swap out power supplies the way we now swap out disks,” he said. Low-power processors like ARM and Atom will further reduce data center costs.

Frameworks are the future as the data center moves toward the “one big computer” ideal. And the race is only getting started. “We’re not at the end of the tunnel of data processing frameworks,” Leibert said. “There will be many more.”

Watch the full interview below (19:46)