Enterprise Chef arrives from Opscode this week with a promise to automate the provisioning and management of compute, networking, and storage resources in data environments. Targeted at both cloud-based and terrestrial data volumes, this software is positioned as means to automate configuration management, cloud management, and continuous delivery of applications and, crucially, their dependent infrastructure.
NOTE: Enterprise Chef was previously offered as two separate products; i.e., Private Chef and Hosted Chef. These have now been realigned under a single brand, available as on-premise software or as a hosted service.
"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, cofounder and chief customer officer, Opscode.
Jacob explains that his firm's "automation platform" is now augmented through collaborative attachment to networking vendors including Arista Networks, Cisco Systems, Cumulus Networks, Juniper Networks, and Plexxi. These firms have worked to help integrate Enterprise Chef into contemporary 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," he said.
Specifically, Opscode has integrated Enterprise Chef with Arista's Extensible Operating System (EOS) to automate the configuration of physical and virtual networking ports using code. By coordinating change management between compute and networking infrastructure, Opscode and Arista say that enterprise IT teams ensure alignment between these core datacenter resources.
Cisco and Opscode are collaborating to integrate Enterprise Chef and Cisco's One Platform Kit (onePK) to automate networking port configuration using Chef Cookbooks. Cisco is also integrating Chef into its Software Maintenance Upgrades (SMU) Manager. Cumulus Networks and Opscode are collaborating to integrate Enterprise Chef and Cumulus Linux, the first, full-featured Linux operating system for datacenter networking.
NOTE: 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 is working with Opscode to integrate Enterprise Chef capabilities into Junos OS to coordinate change management between compute and networking resources. And finally, 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 means of automating network behavior and capacity guarantees alongside the compute infrastructure.
