Salesforce IT injects generative AI to ease its massive datacenter migration

When you’re tasked with migrating 200,000 servers to a new operating system, a helping hand is very welcome indeed. That’s why SaaS giant Salesforce, in migrating its entire data center from CentOS to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, has turned to generative AI — not only to help with the migration but to drive the real-time automation of this new infrastructure.

Central to the success of the migration, which will transpire over the next 18 months, is Salesforce’s deployment of proprietary large language models (LLMs) from its own generative AI platform, says Tyson Lutz, senior vice president of software engineering.  

“This is a massive shift of infrastructure with super low risk,” says Lutz, who is overseeing the project. “This is going to change how infrastructure is managed.”

The migration is still in its early stages. The company’s outgoing platform, CentOS, has been retired commercially, and given aggressive growth —  the 200,000 servers do not even represent all the CentOS-based equipment in Salesforce data centers — Salesforce wanted to re-platform on a more secure, flexible, compliant, and commercially supported OS for its expanding global, public-facing compute infrastructure, Lutz says.

With CentOS now part of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux beta stream chain, RHEL was a logical choice for Salesforce, which conducted a rigorous selection process, deciding on RHEL last December. But the most compelling aspect of the migration is that the process will be aided by Salesforce’s Data Cloud and its own generative AI platform.  

Salesforce recently rearchitected its Data Cloud and Einstein AI framework to introduce Einstein 1, a platform aimed at enabling Salesforce users (and its own IT shop) to connect any data to create a unified profile of their customers and then infuse AI, automation, and analytics into every workload or customer experience, according to the company.