Opscode Platform Puts Advanced Infrastructure Automation Within Reach for Organizations of all Sizes.

SEATTLE, Wash – June 21, 2010 – Opscode, Inc., a cloud infrastructure automation company, today announced the limited beta release of the Opscode Platform, the world’s first hosted configuration management service. The Opscode Platform makes the popular open-source configuration management tool Chef even more powerful and easy to use.

“Automated infrastructure management represents one of the most complex and urgent problems in IT,” said Rachel Chalmers, industry analyst at The 451 Group. “The launch of the Opscode Platform has the promise to become a watershed moment for web infrastructure. It’s the salesforce.com of configuration management.”

With the advent of cloud computing and virtualization, it is easier than ever to create new servers on demand. Very quickly, a bottleneck has developed around the configuration management layer, where files are written and packages are installed as new server infrastructure is built and maintained. Chef and the Opscode Platform allow developers and systems engineers to fully automate their infrastructures with re-usable code, and without having to build or maintain systems management tools.

“Opscode Chef is a boon for developers and systems engineers that crave automation and sane infrastructure. At Etsy, we use Opscode Chef to build, deploy and maintain server infrastructure in an incredibly agile, yet predictable fashion,” said John Allspaw, VP of Technical Operations at Etsy. “It’s indispensable for both our development and operations teams.”

The launch of the Opscode Platform comes on the heels of tremendous investor, customer and developer validation:

• Investment: Opscode recently announced $11M in Series B funding from Battery Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
• Chef Adoption: The growing list of companies that build and configure server infrastructure with Opscode Chef now includes 37Signals, Betfair, Etsy, GoTime, IGN Entertainment, MaxMedia, Scribd, Sonian, Wikia, White Pages and many others.
• Community Growth: To date, more than 150 individual and corporate contributors have signed on to contribute to the Chef project, including, Rackspace, RightScale and the Springsource division of VMware.

“We are excited about the open source contributions the Springsource Division of VMware has made to Opscode Chef.” said Javier Soltero, CTO of Springsource Management Products at VMware. “Chef is an important tool for automating infrastructure management and we look forward to its continued growth and success.”

Following the public launch, Opscode will continue to focus on growing its partner ecosystem to bring the benefits of Chef to an even wider audience. “At Rackspace, we see more and more demand across our customer base for the type of automation that Opscode provides,” said Mark Collier, VP of Business Development at Rackspace. “We are excited to work with Opscode to help our joint customers receive the full promise of cloud computing.”

The Opscode Platform: The Way to a Smarter Infrastructure

At its heart, the Opscode Platform is a centrally managed data store into which servers publish data such as IP addresses, loaded kernel modules, OS versions and more. Administrators can use this data to manipulate entire infrastructures with:

• Search-based Automation: All the data collected by the Opscode platform is indexed and searchable. Users can dynamically query this data from within Chef recipes to configure servers & software.
• Role-based Access Control: Underlying the Opscode Platform is a fine-grained access control system enabling administrators to centrally manage the level of infrastructure access granted to employees, contractors, and other parties.
• Portability: The data stored on the Opscode Platform serves as a virtual blueprint of a given infrastructure, making it much easier to create perfect clones of a production environment.

Pricing and Availability:

The Opscode Platform is in a free beta release for the next 60 days. After the trial period, participants can manage up to 20 nodes on the Platform for $50 per month and $5 per month for each additional node. For more details on pricing and availability, visit www.opscode.com/signupfaq.

About Opscode

Opscode provides world-class infrastructure automation for servers, datacenters, desktops, & the cloud. Opscode makes Chef, the open source configuration management and integration framework used by thousands of organizations to manage and scale infrastructure. Founded in 2008, Opscode’s management team includes experts responsible for creating and operating some of the world’s largest websites and cloud computing platforms. The company is privately held and headquartered in Seattle. More information can be found at www.opscode.com.

Press Contact:

Robert Nachbar, Kismet Communications, 206-427-0389, rob@kismetcommunications.net

Univa UD

Univa is one of the early participating technology vendors to document a reference architecture based on Intel® Xeon® Processor based platforms that companies can use as blueprints for building their own cloud solutions.

“For organizations that need to manage a complex computing environment, such as big companies with multiple divisions or service providers with numerous clients, having a cloud management system that can handle the demands of a multiple-premise infrastructure is essential,”

said Gary Tyreman, SVP Products and Alliances at Univa UD.

“Univa has not only produced the reference architecture for users who need such a technology solution, but we’ve documented the steps to implement it as well.”

The recently published reference architecture, documenting the detailed process to create a cloud infrastructure which can itself consist of multiple internal or external clouds, can be accessed here: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-cloud-builder-best-practices/

The Intel Cloud Builder Program enables easier deployment of cloud solutions. The program provides a starting point to setup, deploy and manage a cloud infrastructure. The primary goal is to simplify the effort to deploy cloud-based solutions for service providers, hosters and enterprise customers looking to use cloud architectures. The program provides tools and best practices for cloud service providers to create a cloud environment based on a defined software and hardware stack.

UniCloud is a cloud management software product that companies use to create internal cloud infrastructures, build external cloud clusters, or create hybrid computing environments by extending on-premise infrastructure to public cloud services like Rackspace or Amazon EC2.

“In Intel® Cloud Builder, we have developed reference architectures demonstrating how to build a cloud on Intel® Xeon® processor based platforms,”

said Billy Cox, director, Cloud Strategy, Intel Software and Services Group.

“The reference architectures provide an excellent starting point with the goal to reduce the complexity and time involved for users to get private clouds up and running. Univa’s participation in the Intel® Cloud Builder Program can help enterprises and service providers move to cloud computing more easily.”

Univa and Intel will host a webcast on June 23, 2010 to present details of the architecture including an exclusive Q&A with the paper’s authors. For more information, visit http://www.univaud.com/about/news/events.php.

For more information on the Intel® Cloud Builder Program, please visit: http://www.intel.com/software/cloudbuilder

For a professional system administrator, it is not too much trouble to set up an open source application using a Rackspace Cloud server.  To install a LAMP application, for example, you would first use the Rackspace console to start a new server.  Everything else is the same as with a physical server: install the LAMP stack, download and install the application code from the open source project site, configure Apache to point to the code directory, and run the configuration procedure for the application.  It probably takes fifteen minutes if you have done it a few times before.

But for mere mortals, these tasks require a daunting learning curve.  Downloading, installing, and connecting L-A-M-P together can be tricky. Every open source application is a little different, so the installation and configuration process requires figuring out details that will not benefit you at all if you don’t end up using the application.  You will also need to know about database users and hosts, set that up in MySQL, and then configure the application consistently.

The Standing Cloud Trial Edition turns this into a three-click process (once you have registered, which is also easy). Pick your application, click Install, and when it is ready (usually within a minute), click Go to access that application.  Standing Cloud pays for the servers, and it keeps several servers ready all the time so you don’t have to wait.  After a period of inactivity, your server and application will time out, and Standing Cloud saves the data for you so you can re-load it again later (which only takes another minute and three more clicks).

This makes a quick try-before-you-decide possible for end-users, and it can save time and trouble for system administrators as well. Standing Cloud currently supports about thirty different open source applications, including all the usual favorites such as WordPress, Drupal, and SugarCRM, as well as more special-purpose systems like Hudson and Mantis.  We add several new applications each month, and not only LAMP-stack apps! There are also Rails and JBoss applications available, and we’re always taking requests.

Why the Rackspace Cloud? Although the Standing Cloud system can access other cloud services, we’ve selected the Rackspace Cloud as our default provider for several reasons:

• Rackspace offers smaller server sizes than competitors, and these are perfectly sufficient for many open source applications, making the economics more attractive.
• Rackspace servers start quickly, so that when many users are active, the Standing Cloud system can maintain its “ready” server inventory.
• In performance testing, Standing Cloud found that Rackspace servers have more consistent behavior than other services, so you know better what you are getting.

These reasons primarily benefit Standing Cloud for the Trial Edition.  But in about a month, we will offer the Community Edition, where users can get their own Rackspace account and host an application permanently through the Standing Cloud service.  This system will add basic application management services on top of Rackspace Cloud, such as automated backup and one-click restore; application monitoring; and of course, simple installation.  With the Community Edition, these Rackspace advantages benefit you, the user, directly.

Standing Cloud takes a somewhat different approach to the open source application trial and installation process, even beyond making it easy.  Other services emphasize “golden images,” for which a separate development effort is required for each possible virtualization environment and then lock you into that environment.  That environment lock-in relates not only to the particular cloud service selected, but also to the operating system distribution and stack version.  Standing Cloud emphasizes a “configuration” approach so that your application and data are mobile – to other operating system distributions, or to your internal virtualized environment, or whatever you like.

The Standing Cloud team and I are very happy to be a part of the Rackspace Cloud Tools Partner Program. Rest assured, we will continue to add new features and functionality in the future, and work hard to make our cloud service even easier to use for non-technical customers.

For More Information on Standing Cloud, Please Click HERE

These tools are excellent at providing you with the essential data you need when you have server problems, and triggering alerts based on it.  However, there’s usually extra work required to get to the root cause of the issue and fix it. While Sysadmin expertise is always going to be needed to a certain degree, I’d like to highlight some of the features of an alternative Cloud Tools Ecosystem Partner tool that works to be more proactive in how it helps you do your job.

Server Density is a hosted server monitoring tool that provides graphing, e-mail, SMS and iPhone push notifications, but also goes much further than just the raw data…

Server Snapshot – What Was Running?

A common problem, especially with things like load spikes, is that by the time you’ve received an alert and logged into your servers, the issue has disappeared.

Using the server snapshot feature of Server Density, you can click any data point on the graphs to view exactly what was running on the server at that point in time. Using the process list and resource breakdown graphs, you can see exactly what caused the alert.

Ideal for troubleshooting, it means you can track down the culprit who’s using too much CPU or memory, and fix the problem right away.

Statistical Analysis

Some of the trickiest problems that arise are those that are caused by an unnoticed change. Over time, servers tend to do the same kind of repetitive tasks, so any sudden or unexpected changes are almost always worth investigating.

Server Density uses behavioral trend analysis to learn what the resource usage data from each of your servers usually looks like. If this changes more than what was expected, then it highlights these anomalies for you to investigate.

For example, if you have a backup job that runs every night spiking your network traffic but that suddenly fails, Server Density will pick up the fact that the usual traffic is missing. Or it could detect a sudden increase in Apache requests that might be caused by a spider leeching from your website.

The point of this feature is to help you ensure that your servers continue to work properly on a daily basis by being proactive and not just reactive.

Installation

Getting Server Density monitoring set up is really easy. Once you have signed up for the free trial and added a server, instructions for installing the monitoring daemon are provided. The daemon is open source and written in Python (no programming knowledge required!), and it posts back every 60 seconds over port 80 (HTTP) or 443 (HTTPS).  It can even be installed and managed using your favorite OS packages like RPM or apt-get.  In addition, it also supports dynamic scaling so you can automatically start monitoring Cloud Server instances as soon as they’re launched.

Alerting

Based on your server specs, Server Density will make a few basic suggestions for what alerts you should configure to start with. You can get notifications sent by e-mail, SMS or iPhone push notifications provided through their[free iPhone monitoring app, which also includes the graphing feature.

Server Density is available as a free trial, after which you can pay for the extra features or continue use the free version. Give it a go and let me know what you think!

Paul Ford, from Rackspace Corporate Development, is Your Connection to the Rackspace “Cloud Tools Partners” Ecosystem .  To find out more about how Server Density and other tools can increase your productivity, satisfy your IT needs, and generally make your life easier, contact him any time at paul.ford@rackspace.com