Puppet Releases Enterprise Automation Tool

Puppet Labs, which creates open source systems management solutions, today announced the release of Puppet Enterprise, the first commercially supported version of Puppet, a software tool that allows data center managers to automate the configuration and updating of hundreds or even thousands of servers.

High-profile customers such as Twitter, Match.com, Red Hat and social game maker Zynga, already use Puppet to manage millions of machines, with automated provisioning, patching and configuring of operating systems and applications.

Puppet's ability to automate server provisioning is particularly useful for fast-growing companies like Zynga. Each month, more than 215 million users play their games, such as Mafia Wars and Farmville, and TechCrunch reports that Zynga's products move 1 petabyte of data each day, requiring the  company to add as many as 1,000 servers each week.

"We have many companies that are currently using Puppet," said Puppet Labs Founder and Chief Executive Offficer Luke Kanies, "They include Google, Twitter, Zynga, the Bank of America, stock exchanges, Disney and HBO." He said financial institutions are using Puppet for the ability to accurately and quickly manage their systems.

The availability of Puppet Enterprise (PE) brings further ease and convenience to the data center manager through bundling multiple individual products into one. This will give a single download and a single click to install, and also provide a dashboard of all products together, including third-party tools which are part of the system.

"PE does not add more functionality now, but it provides a base for adding additional apps in the future," said Kanies.

"There's a tremendous amount of innovation going on in the data center at the moment, from virtualization, to cloud computing, to the consumerization of IT," said Michael Cote, analyst at RedMonk. "As always, IT's challenge is to rapidly deploy, configure, and maintain these innovations and existing software to the rest of the business. The type of management that Puppet Enterprise brings to the table is impressive and is helping its users speed up how they provide IT services while at the same time offering the controls needed to keep all that happy chaos well managed."

Pre-configured with the scalability and performance needed for large installations, Puppet Enterprise gives users access to the latest releases and updates as well as enterprise-class support, which includes issue resolution and feature enhancement priority requests. PE decreases the time it takes to get ramped up with Puppet and streamlines the process of keeping Puppet deployments up to date.

"Puppet Enterprise represents an important step in the evolution of the Puppet open source project. Over the last five years, thousands of companies have made Puppet a core part of their systems infrastructure, using it to manage their most vital IT assets," said Kanies. "Puppet Enterprise means users can be more productive in less time, with less effort."

For more information on Zynga's use of Puppet to scale quickly, visit Puppet's blog for a case study.