Opscode Announces Next Generation of Private Chef™ For The Enterprise

SEATTLE, Feb. 4, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Opscode^®, the leader in cloud infrastructure automation, today announced the release of the next generation of Private Chef™, featuring a new management console, centralized activity reporting, and "push" client runs. Private Chef, based on the rock-solid codebase of Opscode Chef™ 11, released today (see separate press release), delivers a scalable and robust infrastructure automation solution for large-scale enterprise compute environments in the data center, private or public cloud. Using Private Chef, enterprises can automate everything from server configuration to application delivery, creating an efficient, consistent and transparent development and operations pipeline that increases productivity and reduces business risk.

"Enterprise IT is rapidly adopting scale-out compute infrastructures to continually get more done, faster, in an evermore complex world," said Christopher Brown, CTO, Opscode. "While this shift to scale-out helps address the 'speed of business' issue, it also creates a major challenge – how do enterprises acquire the tools and skills to efficiently manage dynamic, fast-growing infrastructure? The answer is Private Chef, which provides the skill-building automation platform and robust feature set businesses need to stay ahead of changes in today's IT-driven economy."

Opscode also today announced that Facebook has deployed Private Chef (see separate release) to automate the configuration of thousands of servers in its web-tier infrastructure.

"There are three dimensions of scale we generally look at for infrastructure – the number of servers, the volume of different configurations across those systems, and the number of people required to maintain those configurations," said Phil Dibowitz, Production Engineer, Facebook. "Opscode Private Chef provided an automation solution flexible enough to bend to our scale dynamics without requiring us to change our workflow. Private Chef provided top-flight support, earlier access to upcoming changes, and additional rich features on top of the functionality in open-source Chef. Further, Private Chef's basis on open-source Chef also aligns with our own open philosophy allowing us to contribute back to the greater Chef community."

"The convergence of virtualization, cloud, mobility and social technologies are dramatically increasing IT complexity and rapidly expanding the day-to-day demands placed on IT operations teams. Traditional manual workflows and ad hoc processes are too slow and inefficient to keep up with the needs of these dynamic environments," said Mary Johnston Turner, Research Vice President, Enterprise Systems Management Software, IDC. "In a recent IDC survey, a wide range of enterprise and SMB IT decision makers targeted improving IT staff productivity and operational efficiency as their top IT management priority for the next several years. IT automation solutions that can streamline operations and eliminate repetitive, error-prone manual tasks are necessary to achieve these goals."

Private Chef For the Enterprise

Based on Opscode Chef 11, the popular open-source systems integration framework, Private Chef is a feature-rich, enterprise infrastructure automation software platform. Private Chef delivers a flexible model for reuse, enabling customers to easily and consistently configure and deploy infrastructure as code across any operating system from Windows to Unix and Linux, in any compute environment. Private Chef simplifies systems management, enables continuous application delivery, and reduces operating risk through easy, reusable 'recipes' and 'cookbooks' of code-based configuration and deployment commands for resources, services and applications. The next generation of Private Chef includes a number of key enterprise capabilities designed to maximize the value of IT resources and minimize costs:

• Full Infrastructure Visibility: Private Chef offers a powerful graphical user interface enabling customers to easily navigate, visualize and analyze complex infrastructure data through a single view. Featuring bulk action grouping, advanced data filtering and customizable views, the Private Chef GUI interface enables users to improve organizational transparency and accelerate productivity by abstracting infrastructure management away from the command line.  
• Comprehensive Resource Information: Private Chef features an easy-to-use Activity Reporting Dashboard providing a single point of reference for the entire infrastructure. The Activity Reporting Dashboard delivers historical and current, per-activity data into resource churn and client run success and failure, enabling enterprise IT teams to more efficiently manage infrastructure and better adapt to change.
• On-Demand Command Execution: Private Chef delivers Push functionality as a Chef Server plugin that enables users to select a group of servers, specify an immediate action for those resources to execute, and track the status of the request as it progresses. After a simple install of Push, users can edit and execute command code in real time to respond to changing conditions, increasing IT agility and control across ten or thousands of servers.

Pricing and Availability

Opscode today announced subscription-based pricing for Private Chef. For more information please go here.

Getting Started with Chef

Chef 11 can be downloaded for free here. Full documentation for installing, running and using Chef 11 can be found here. For more information on commercial support options for Chef 11, please go here.

About Opscode Chef

Opscode's pioneering software, Chef, is an open-source systems integration framework built specifically for automating the cloud. No matter how complex the realities of business, Chef makes it easy to deploy servers and scale applications throughout an entire infrastructure. Through a combination of configuration management and service-oriented architectures, Chef, Hosted Chef™ and Private Chef make it easy to create an elegant, fully automated infrastructure while simplifying systems management.

About Opscode

Opscode is the leader in cloud infrastructure automation. Opscode helps companies of all sizes develop fully automated server infrastructures that scale easily and predictably; can be quickly rebuilt in any environment; and save developers and systems engineers time and money. Opscode's team is comprised of web infrastructure experts responsible for building and operating some of the world's largest websites and cloud computing platforms. More information can be found at www.opscode.com.

Press Contact:
Lucas Welch
[email protected]
206-745-0000

SOURCE Opscode