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Puppet Enterprise 2.0 automates cloud, on-premise deployment

Puppet Enterprise 2.0 is an enhanced commercially supported version of Puppet for the cloud and on-premise servers that features new cloud provisioning, change monitoring and management orchestration from a sole console an d new GUIs. The first upgrade of the commercial edition will ship Oct 21.
Written by Paula Rooney, Contributor

Puppet Labs is moving forward new provisioning, orchestration and automation capabilities designed to advance the platform's stellar reputation in the management arena.

Puppet Enterprise 2.0, which debuted this week and ships October 21, is the first major upgrade of a company's commercially supported version of Puppet that counts Google, Twitter, Apple, NYSE, Match.com, Red Hat and Citrix among its 250 enterprise customers.

The Puppet open source project has been around since 2005, but the first commercial product shipped just last February. The platform --which competes with BladeLogic and Opsware -- allows customers to quickly provision  infrastructure in the cloud or in the data center.

The newest edition offers new cloud provisioning, change monitoring and management orchestration from a single console.

Luke Kanies, CEO/Founder of Puppet Labs, said the platform's versatility in deploying virtual and physical machines in the cloud and in  the enterprise is a major strength.

Puppet doesn't just allow customers to deploy workloads in the cloud or enterprise. It tells virtual machines what to do.

Here are key excepts from the press release that went out this week at PuppetCon in the company's home base of Portland, Oregon:

New graphical user console provides an intuitive way for systems administrators to leverage the power of Puppet. Right out of the box, it enables agile response and rapid scaling by locating existing resources in the network and cloning them to new nodes,maintaining continuous configuration management as the infrastructure expands.

Provisioning capabilities make it easy for systems administrators to quickly scale infrastructure using Amazon’s EC2 cloud service or VMware in their own data centers.

New orchestration capabilities give systems administrators “command and control” power to efficiently make parallel changes across clusters of nodes with just a single command.

New baselining capabilities enable systems administrators to monitor their infrastructure’s compliance against a desired-state, a critical input to comprehensive change management and auditing processes.

Kanies said version 2.0's features enable IT administrators to execute flawless upgrades and institute true automation capabilities.

"We live in a world where most people are not doing automation. Most are replying on scripts and ad hoc administration and. This tool gives you [the ability]to do discovery of which versions you have, and clone them to all machines so they're configured the same," he told this blogger in a telephone interview this week.

"It also has GUIs for discovery and orchestartion that makes it easy to implement management solutions without a huge investment," he added. "We still see companies not doing any centralized managament or infrastructure management or automation. "

Kanies said Puppet's new features allow customers to develop and maintain a modern hybrid infrastructure.

"Puppet has been an enabler of choosing betwen whichever you wan t--physical or virtual -- and offers great portability so can move friom one to another," he said in a phone call this week. "We have once customer building a data center to transition off the cloud. Their running 30,000 machines on Amazon EC2 and the economics dont work at that scale."

Puppet Enterprise 2.0 is available on October 21, Customers may download and manage up to 10 nodes free of charge. Pricing starts at $1,995 for 25 nodes and roughly $56,000 for 1000 nodes, Kanies said.

"“Whether you’re managing a handful of servers on-premise or thousands in the cloud, Puppet Enterprise 2.0 makes it dramatically easier to quickly provision new applications and respond to infrastructure changes, accelerating IT’s delivery of value to the business," he said in the press release.

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