Enterprise

Puppet Redefines Infrastructure Automation

Petros Koutoupis — Wed, 15 May 2019 11:30:00 +0000

Puppet has long been regarded as nothing more than an open-source software configuration management tool. The company has become a standard for automating the delivery and operation of the software that powers everything around us. Well, this is about to change. Puppet has evolved and has positioned itself to tackle enterprise-grade problems. All of this and more, was announced on May 2, 2019.

So what makes this announcement so exciting? I sat down with Matt Waxman, Puppet's Head of Products to learn more.

Petros Koutoupis: Please introduce yourself to our readers.

Matt Waxman: I have been the Head of Products at Puppet since 2017. I have been in the Product space for at least 20 years, largely focused on infrastructure. Before coming to Puppet, I was in data storage backup, replication and disaster recovery. I am the guy who deals with roadmaps and user experience across our product portfolio.

Petros: What can you tell us about this announcement?

Matt Waxman: Automation of more than just the state of your virtual machines, containers and so on is extremely important. How do you enable more teams? It is all about service, safety and quality of delivery. This is what we are doing with Puppet to serve those exact needs. And with our latest release 2019.1, we simplify the experience in automation to meet those demands.

We enhanced our agentless and agent-based capabilities, such as supporting the automation of network devices (for example, Cisco and Palo Alto) and giving users the ability to automate anything and anywhere quickly, efficiently, safely and at scale. But some of our most notable changes are centered around our agentless task runner, Bolt. We introduced it about a year and a half ago. Bolt is an automation tool built to automate anything in your infrastructure without the hassle. It was very well received by the Open Source community. What is new here though is we have found that more and more customers and users are starting to automate from a development perspective. Developers have a constant need to stand up an infrastructure quickly for both testing and support. Not only did we make Bolt more user-friendly for the broader community, but we also added YAML support.

Petros: Why is this announcement so exciting?

Matt Waxman: The demand for infrastructure-focused automation is growing, and many companies are unable to scale to meet that demand. With release 2019.1, we made a lot of investment in not only addressing this challenge but also in simplifying the experience.

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Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure: an Interview with Canonical

Petros Koutoupis — Thu, 09 May 2019 12:00:00 +0000

by Petros Koutoupis

On April 29, 2019, Canonical made headlines by officially announcing the availability of Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure If you are unfamiliar with Canonical and the work that they do:

Canonical is the publisher of Ubuntu, the OS for most public cloud workloads as well as the emerging categories of smart gateways, self-driving cars and advanced robots. Canonical provides enterprise security, support and services to commercial users of Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure changes the entire landscape of service offerings for open-source software. Instead of itemizing and charging for each and every component or add-on, Canonical promises its customers a per-node service package, regardless of the technologies running on it. I was able to sit down and chat with Stephan Fabel, who was generous enough to provide a bit more detail around this exciting announcement.

Petros Koutoupis: Tell us about yourself.

Stephan Fabel: My name is Stephan Fabel, and I am Director of Product over at Canonical. So, I am running a team as the Product Manager, and I am responsible for the portfolio of products that go out to our customers.

Petros: For our readers who are unfamiliar, what is Ubuntu Advantage?

Stephan: As you might know, Ubuntu always has been freely available as an open-source Linux distribution for everybody to consume. And, for those users who wish to enter that commercial relationship with Canonical, either because they are interested in our additional bit-streams that we offer like kernel patches, extended security maintenance, FIPS compliance crypto libraries, or because they would like to get support for each of those open infrastructure components that we are covering, Ubuntu Advantage is the program that they would subscribe to.

Petros: What makes this recent announcement of Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure so exciting?

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Zentera Systems, Inc.'s CoIP Security Enclave

James Gray — Wed, 15 Nov 2017 12:38:33 +0000

by James Gray

On the heels of being crowned "Cool Vendor in Cloud Security" by Gartner, Zentera Systems, Inc., announced an upgrade to its flagship CoIP Security Enclave solution. The solution enables enterprises to specify their micro-segmentation policies, which the Enclave software automatically converts into application-aware segmentation rules that protect application workloads in unified virtual overlay networks called "enclaves". Those workloads can be running anywhere, including on-premises and across any cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments.

This new release extends the flagship application with CoIP Smart Discovery capability, which self-scrutinizes workload behavior to uncover existing application compute flows and behavior. Based on this intel, enterprise IT security teams then can complete micro-segmentation definitions and find any potential gaps in their segmentation implementation quickly. Such intelligent automation saves teams considerable time and effort, especially in a hybrid environment where numerous applications and workloads are combined.

The Smart Discovery functionality is fully integrated with CoIP Application Interlock, an existing security capability that allows companies to specify which authorized applications in a specific CoIP enclave are allowed to access the enclave's network. All other applications are locked out, greatly enhancing enclave security. With CoIP Secure Enclave, says Zentera, a hybrid or cloud environment is no different from on-premises, and enterprises maintain complete control over connectivity and security to implement one unified security policy across all environments.

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Datamation's "Leading Big Data Companies" Report

James Gray — Fri, 13 Oct 2017 16:13:37 +0000

by James Gray

The Big Data market is in a period of remarkable transition. If keeping tabs on this dynamic sector is in your wheelhouse, Datamation has made your homework easier by developing "Leading Big Data Companies", a report that provides "a snapshot of a market sector in transition". Ranging from established legacy vendors to start-ups, this report details the numerous strategies that are exploited in today's Big Data landscape. The core technologies employed by this diverse group of vendors include cloud, open source, AI and several others.

This report belongs to Datamation's ongoing focus on the latest emerging tech for the enterprise. In the mere seven years that have passed since Yahoo! introduced Hadoop, Big Data has burgeoned in popularity as ever more firms seek insights from the massive amounts of data at their disposal.

Because Big Data has matured differently from most technologies in that no single leader has emerged after nearly a decade, the analytics industry finds itself still in growth mode, making it dynamic and challenging for those trying to make sense of it on their own.

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SUSE Software-Defined Storage Leverages Open Source to Break Proprietary Lock-in and Reduce Cost

John Grogan — Thu, 12 Oct 2017 11:57:20 +0000

by John Grogan

Gartner analysts noted in a recent Cool Vendor report:

It has become painfully evident that storage capacity demands, and expectations for far more rapid provisioning of that storage, have far outpaced the ability of [infrastructure and operations] teams' capabilities. Far-more-automated systems are required to restore a sense of balance, that is, storage solutions that offer much greater scale, but also much more automation.

The power of storage solutions has always resided in the software. SUSE software-defined storage gives one more flexibility and choice than traditional storage appliances provide. It allows users to meet constantly, even exponentially growing storage needs more securely and cost effectively using industry-standard hardware and open-source-based software-defined storage solutions. Accordingly, SUSE has introduced SUSE Enterprise Storage 5 with enhanced ease of management, improved performance and expanded features, including new disk-to-disk backup capabilities for enterprise customers, fulfilling the need for "much greater scale, but also much more automation" as cited by Gartner.

"Every generation of enterprise infrastructure innovation is now being built on open source", said Gerald Pfeifer, Vice President of Products and Technology Programs at SUSE. He continued:

SUSE is expert at both contributing to and using upstream innovation to create enterprise-grade, secure solutions that can be combined with other technologies to best address customer needs. This approach applied to software-defined storage delivers highly scalable solutions that radically reduce storage costs in terms of both capital and operations expense.

SUSE Enterprise Storage 5

The latest release of SUSE's intelligent software-defined storage management solution, SUSE Enterprise Storage 5, will enable IT organizations to accelerate innovation and reduce costs by efficiently transforming their enterprise storage infrastructures. It is based on the Luminous release of the Ceph open-source project, and it is ideally suited for compliance, archive, backup and large data storage. Large data applications include video surveillance, CCTV, online presence and training, streaming media, X-rays, seismic processing, genomic mapping and computer-assisted design. Backup and archive applications include Veritas NetBackup, Commvault and Micro Focus Data Protector, along with compliance solutions such as iTernity.

SUSE Enterprise Storage 5 is the first commercial offering to support the new BlueStore back end within Ceph. This follows SUSE's first-to-market support for iSCSI and CephFS in previous versions of SUSE Enterprise Storage. Notable benefits of this release include:

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SUSE Unveils Near-Zero Downtime for SAP Apps

John Grogan — Wed, 11 Oct 2017 15:54:19 +0000

by John Grogan

Zero downtime is, of course, a mythical holy grail. According to IDC senior market analyst Prabhitha Sheethal Dcruz:

Zero downtime frequently translates to 99.999% uptime, which equates to 5.26 minutes of downtime per year. While short outages may be acceptable for non-critical workloads, the same is not true for business-critical and mission-critical workloads where the downtime stakes can be very high—consider a stock exchange where a single lost transaction may incur a significant financial cost or a medical system downtime that can cost lives.

So zero downtime is a lofty but difficult to achieve goal. SUSE recently announced a certified near-zero-downtime technology for workloads running in SAP software. According to Naji Almahmoud, SUSE vice president of Global Alliances:

SUSE is an expert at bringing together emerging, fast-paced open-source innovation and turning it into reliable enterprise-grade solutions. Customers running mission-critical workloads can now have more confidence as SUSE works closely with SAP to help ensure near-zero-downtime capabilities for its users.

SUSE, as you already likely know, is an open-source operating system and infrastructure provider for workloads running in SAP software. SUSE has further strengthened its offerings for users of SAP software with new support for high-availability and disaster-recovery solutions, such as:

SUSE support for takeover automation for scale-out clusters in SAP HANA: SUSE now provides automated takeover for users and applications, complementing the SAP HANA platform and data replication between SAP HANA nodes (scale-up) and clusters (scale-out). The SUSE offering is part of a leading platform for SAP solutions, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications.
Certification for high-availability clusters and improved maintenance for SAP NetWeaver 7.40: SAP has certified SUSE technology to manage high-availability clusters running on the SAP NetWeaver technology platform. The certification, NW-HA-CLU 7.40, is available for x86-64 now, with support for Power (both Big Endian and Little Endian) coming in the next quarter. This makes possible transparent rolling updates of the SAP NetWeaver kernel. While support for SAP NetWeaver high availability has been available previously, SUSE now also supports SAP NetWeaver 7.40 and above, included in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications.

For more information about SUSE support for SAP solutions and customer workloads, visit https://www.suse.com/products/sles-for-sap and https://www.suse.com/partners/alliance/sap.

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SUSE and SAP: Shared Roots Produce Fruit

John Grogan — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 15:15:43 +0000

by John Grogan

SUSE and SAP have been collaborating for 18 years now. SAP is ubiquitous in the enterprise environment, and SUSE is now powering its robust SAP Cloud Platform.

Last year's SUSECon was all about the enterprise. This year's SUSECon doubled down on last year's commitment to becoming a leading enterprise service provider by announcing, among other things, this latest SUSE/SAP collaboration that has SUSE OpenStack Cloud and SUSE Enterprise Storage as key elements of the SAP Cloud Platform. The fruit of this collaboration will provide robust, enterprise-grade infrastructure services for running applications that allow businesses to collect, manage, analyze and leverage information of all types to extend and connect to business systems.

SAP Cloud Platform is SAP's agile Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for digital transformation, with comprehensive application development services and capabilities that allow businesses to innovate new edge scenarios, ultimately helping them to adapt and advance continuously. It enables customers to achieve business agility, create a truly integrated and optimized enterprise, and accelerate digital transformation across the business without the requirement of maintaining or investing in on-premises infrastructure.

SUSE OpenStack Cloud is an automated cloud computing platform that helps enable organizations to deploy rapidly and manage easily highly available, mixed-hypervisor private clouds. The latest version is based on the OpenStack Newton release. SUSE Enterprise Storage is an intelligent software-defined storage management solution, powered by Ceph technology. It enables IT to transform enterprise storage infrastructure to adapt to changing business and data demands seamlessly by delivering cost-efficient, highly scalable and resilient storage using commodity off-the-shelf servers and disk drives.

"Customers expect extremely high levels of reliability, scalability and performance, and SUSE has worked closely with SAP to help ensure that SUSE OpenStack Cloud and SUSE Enterprise Storage with SAP Cloud Platform deliver exactly that", said Thomas Di Giacomo, SUSE chief technology officer. He continued:

Our shared roots run deep, as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications has long been a leading platform for SAP solutions on Linux. Today, SUSE also collaborates with SAP within the Cloud Foundry Foundation and shares a vision for the convergence of Kubernetes, containers and Cloud Foundry technologies. Through it all, SUSE's mission is to continue to be the best platform and open-source technology provider for running SAP applications, services and workloads.

Björn Goerke, chief technology officer and president, SAP Cloud Platform, SAP SE, commented:

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Becoming a Cloud Native Organization

Carlie Fairchild — Tue, 03 Oct 2017 16:10:12 +0000

by Carlie Fairchild

As Linux has become the mainstay of Enterprise IT, it has become increasingly challenging to install, test and ultimately review properly new products built for large, scalable environments. Although Linux Journal publishes substantial, in-depth product reviews, we can’t possibly review every worthwhile product, especially in an arena like ours that grows and changes so fast. Increasingly, too, important discussions focus on issues of design process, organization and communication—not just on specific products or tools. This leads us to introduce, In Their Words: Voices from the Community. Joe Beda, Co-Founder and CTO of Heptio, is featured in our first Voices from the Community book, this one titled, Becoming a Cloud Native Organization.

Download Becoming a Cloud Native Organization now.

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Caldwell Partners' Cyber Advisory Board Service

James Gray — Fri, 15 Sep 2017 16:04:01 +0000

by James Gray

For many enterprises, cyber risk is the top business risk. Meanwhile, there is simply not a sufficiently large talent pool of cyber-risk professionals to satisfy the ever-growing demand. To assuage this business challenge, executive search firm Caldwell Partners announced the launch of its Cyber Advisory Board service, a means for companies to obtain the level of expertise they require to implement industry best practices quickly and effectively.

Caldwell Partners' new service allows enterprises to eschew failed searches for CISOs, which frequently result in over-priced and under-qualified candidates. Companies obtain access to a Cyber Advisory Board of recognized cyber industry leaders, tailored to fit needs the needs of a particular company and its industry. This solution is especially helpful for clients who opt for step-up candidates or deploy trusted executives open to a career change into cyber security.

The advisory board provides a range of services—from mentoring a company's CISO to helping develop cyber strategy to educating the company's C-level executives and boards, all the way to giving guidance on best practices with regard to cyber breach responses. A Cyber Advisory Board provides deep expertise and consistency and satisfies increased governance on public company boards faced with regulators who exert ever greater pressure on companies to demonstrate a commitment to best practices.

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SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications

James Gray — Wed, 06 Sep 2017 14:46:16 +0000

by James Gray

Saving customers time, effort and budget as they implement SAP landscapes, including on-premises and now on-demand, are the core selling points for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications.

The latest release of the SAP-focused SUSE Linux server is also now available as the operating system for SAP solutions on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

The first supported Linux for SAP HANA on GCP, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications bolsters enterprise agility and reduces operating costs as customers pay only for what they use. With the addition of Google Cloud Platform, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications now is available on three major public cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

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