Opscode on the rise in the enterprise

“Enterprise organizations are in the midst of a major business transformation, driven by the radically new way in which customers are purchasing and consuming goods and services today. As a result, technology is serving as the key touch point to users and the role of IT has shifted from the back office to the front office,” said Adam Jacob, Co-Founder and Chief Customer Officer, Opscode. "Today we're delivering an automation platform that accelerates this transformation by delivering on-demand IT services to achieve the speed necessary for meeting the new expectations of customers."

Fortune 1000 Customer Growth
Opscode also announced that Fortune 1000 companies represent 60 percent of Opscode’s total sales and that the company’s Fortune 1000 customer base has grown by more than 150 percent year over year since June 30, 2012. To capitalize on enterprise demand and better meet the needs of large-scale organizations, Opscode is collaborating with leading providers in compute, networking, and storage to deliver full stack automation for data center, private and public cloud infrastructure.

Automation in Networking
Opscode is collaborating with leading networking vendors, including Arista Networks (see separate release), Cisco Systems, Cumulus Networks, Juniper Networks, and Plexxi to integrate Enterprise Chef into next-generation networking technologies. By enabling IT teams to manage compute and networking resources from a single automation platform, Enterprise Chef speeds up bandwidth provisioning to accelerate IT operations and improves system availability.

Arista Networks – Opscode has integrated Enterprise Chef with Arista Extensible Operating System (EOS), automating the configuration of physical and virtual networking ports using code. By coordinating change management between compute and networking infrastructure, Opscode and Arista help enterprise IT teams ensure alignment between these core datacenter resources.

Cisco Systems – Cisco and Opscode are collaborating to integrate Enterprise Chef and Cisco's One Platform Kit (onePK), enabling Cisco customers to automate networking port configuration using Chef Cookbooks. Cisco is also integrating Chef into its Software Maintenance Upgrades (SMU) Manager, which will enable the SMU Manager to communicate with Chef via an API and provide users the ability to automate package updates to networking resources at any scale.

Cumulus Networks – Cumulus and Opscode are collaborating to integrate Enterprise Chef and Cumulus Linux, the first, full-featured Linux operating system for datacenter networking. By presenting a standard Linux interface, Cumulus Linux allows Opscode Chef to manage switches in the same manner Chef already manages standard Linux servers, delivering the full benefits of automation for configuring networking resources.

Juniper Networks – Juniper Networks is working with Opscode to integrate Enterprise Chef capabilities into Junos® OS, enabling IT organizations to coordinate change management more simply and seamlessly between compute and networking resources. By combining Enterprise Chef and Junos OS, customers will be able to perform common network configurations directly rather than through a series of manual processes, thereby saving time and mitigating risk of human error.

Plexxi – Plexxi is working with Opscode to integrate Enterprise Chef and Affinity networking, which offers an open model for describing application workload requirements. Combining Enterprise Chef and Affinity will give users a seamless, flexible solution for automating network behavior and capacity guarantees alongside the compute infrastructure. Plexxi will be giving an initial demonstration of Chef and Affinity at VMworld, Aug. 25-29, in San Francisco, CA, in booth #636.

Automation for Windows and IBM SmartCloud
Opscode has also announced a collaboration with Microsoft Corp. to enable both the Opscode Chef open source automation platform and Opscode Enterprise Chef to take advantage of the new Windows PowerShell Desired State Configuration feature of the Windows Management Framework (WMF). This new collaboration builds on continued efforts between Opscode, Microsoft, and Microsoft Open Technologies to enhance Opscode Chef and Enterprise Chef's comprehensive Windows configuration automation capabilities and help customers avoid configuration drift in enterprise IT environments. Opscode Chef and Enterprise Chef currently provides native, open source Windows functionality for a number of critical operations, including server provisioning and configuration management, and is adding new options to help users easily automate Windows resources in the data center and public and private cloud.

On Tuesday, August 27, 2013, at 10 am PT, Opscode will host a live demo of Opscode Chef's automation capabilities for Windows, including Windows stack automation of a .NET application and details on the entire range of Chef resources currently available for Windows environments.

Continuing Opscode's collaboration with IBM to provide open source cloud automation for the enterprise, IBM recently delivered the SmartCloud Orchestrator Content Pack for both Opscode Chef and Enterprise Chef, enabling SmartCloud users to automate core infrastructure operations by deploying Chef Cookbooks through the IBM Business Process Manager.

Automation in Storage
Opscode has joined with Netherlands-based IT outsourcing leader Schuberg Philis and software-defined storage leader Nexenta (see separate release) to deliver a Chef Cookbook for automating NexentaStor ZFS-based storage resources. Using Enterprise Chef, Schuberg Philis can manage storage configurations and compute resources in its CloudStack-based hybrid cloud via a single automation platform, accelerating resource and application provisioning, improving system visibility and resiliency, streamlining management and monitoring, and reducing risk for its customers' applications. In addition, Enterprise Chef's multi-tenancy gives Schuberg Philis the flexibility to manage compute, storage and network resources from its hybrid cloud to specific customers, providing dedicated configuration management and infrastructure for customers' mission critical application infrastructures.