Developed with EMC, open source 'Razor' enables dynamic management of the entire IT lifecycle, from bare metal to fully operational cloud applications

LAS VEGAS, May 23 — Today at EMC World, Puppet Labs, the leading provider of IT automation software for system administrators, announced its open sourcing of Razor, a next-generation provisioning solution. Developed with EMC, Razor is the first solution to dynamically provision hardware using auto-discovered, real-time inventory data, eliminating inefficient, error-prone manual processes and speeding the delivery of deployed applications for DevOps environments.

Building on Puppet Labs' foundational enterprise message bus and node inventory technologies, MCollective and Facter respectively, Puppet Labs and EMC collaboratively developed Razor to meet the needs of system administrators managing infrastructure at the scale and agility needed for the cloud. In addition, open sourcing enables the large and active Puppet community to take advantage of Razor's modular architecture and develop plug-ins to extend support for any operating system and any boot sequence.

"Barcodes, scanners, manually updated spreadsheets, and golden images were good enough – in the 1990s," said Luke Kanies, founder and CEO of Puppet Labs. "Working together with EMC, we're proud to open source Razor, an operating system-agnostic provisioning solution that enables system administrators to programmatically inventory, provision, and configure their hardware infrastructure as productively and rapidly as they do their virtual and cloud infrastructures."

"Virtualization and cloud computing have forever changed the way IT environments are built and managed. By contributing to the Razor project, EMC is delivering critical provisioning tools required for the success of this open source community – thereby accelerating cloud adoption," said Dan Hushon, Office of the CTO, EMC. "Puppet Labs' users will reap the benefits of this cutting-edge project within their DevOps environments."

Key Capabilities

• Auto-Discovered Real-Time Inventory Data. Razor provides auto-discovered, real-time inventory data for every hardware node, eliminating inefficient, error-prone manual processes. As a result, system administrators get full insight into the latest, up-to-date status of their hardware inventory.
• Dynamic Image Selection. Razor automatically selects the correct operating system image based on the auto-discovered, real-time inventory data, removing the need for manual intervention whenever there is a change in hardware configuration.
• Model-Based Provisioning. Razor models the desired state of each hardware node and its operating system, automatically tracks provisioning progress toward this state, and can even decide when to re-provision. This gives system administrators full control over a node's boot sequence and a complete log of its lifecycle.
• Open APIs and Plug-in Architecture. Razor's RESTful open APIs give system administrators full programmatic control of the rules and models that govern operating system image selection and hardware provisioning. Furthermore, Razor's modular architecture enables the Puppet community to collaborate and share plug-ins to support any operating system and any boot sequence.
• Metal-to-Cloud Application Lifecycle Management. With Razor, Puppet Labs is able to provide automation for every phase of the IT infrastructure lifecycle, eliminating the headache of trying to integrate and maintain multiple siloed management tools.

Supporting Quotes

"Virtualization and cloud computing have raised the bar on what businesses expect from their IT organizations in terms of agility," said Ronni Colville, VP & Distinguished Analyst, Gartner. "Solutions that deliver flexible, dynamic provisioning and configuration of hardware infrastructure will facilitate further adoption of DevOps practices and be enablers for system administrators."

"Last year we deployed Puppet Enterprise to support our move to DevOps," said Mark Schena, Manager of Systems at Constant Contact, the leading provider of email marketing solutions for small businesses. "Razor enables us to 'puppetize' our server hardware and gives us a complete end-to-end IT automation solution with which we can provision and deploy applications even faster."

Additional Resources

• Learn more about Puppet Labs
• Follow Puppet Labs on Twitter @puppetlabs
• See Puppet Labs onstage at EMC World at "Chad's World" keynote at 5:30pm PDT Wednesday, May 23
• Visit Puppet Labs' booth at EMC World in the EMC Innovation Center

Pricing and Availability

Razor is open sourced under the Apache 2.0 license and is immediately available for free download from forge.puppetlabs.com.

About Puppet Labs

Puppet Labs, Inc. (www.puppetlabs.com) was founded in 2005 and shipped the first release of the open source Puppet Project later the same year. Puppet's popularity has since grown to where it now is responsible for managing millions of nodes across thousands of companies and organizations, both on-premise and in the cloud, including Zynga, Citrix, Shopzilla, Match.com, Oracle/Sun, to name a few. In 2011, Puppet Labs shipped its first commercial software product, Puppet Enterprise. Now numbering seventy employees and based in Portland, Oregon, Puppet Labs is backed by investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Google Ventures, VMware, Cisco, True Ventures, Radar Partners, and Emerson Street Partners.

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Source: Puppet Labs, Inc.