Marshall University Achieves Greater IT Agility with Opscode

SEATTLE, Sept. 6, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Opscode, Inc., the leader in cloud infrastructure automation, today announced that Marshall University, West Virginia's second largest public university, is successfully using Opscode's Chef to automate its servers and increase agility and reliability to more efficiently manage platform configuration, saving valuable time and resources.

Marshall University employs a modest IT staff to manage all of the university's computer services for 14,000 active students and approximately 1,800 staff and faculty. As the university continued to grow, its infrastructure became more complex with a mix of Linux and Windows machines, virtualization infrastructure, computational research, database and webserver systems, enterprise resource planner (ERP) system and a variety of vendor-supplied embedded appliances. Marshall needed a solution to help automate and simplify management of its systems.

Marshall University deployed Opscode's Chef to quickly and easily automate a large portion of its nearly 300 servers while efficiently managing platform configuration. Chef is a server configuration management tool that lets IT managers express the design of the company infrastructure in code. Integrating Chef enabled Marshall University to alleviate the stress from a modest IT team and free up time and resources

"The major benefit with Chef is the reduction in time, which frees up resources. Because we are such a small team, the amount of time we can save means we can focus on more complicated problems," said Eric G. Wolfe, senior Linux administrator for Marshall University. "We have amazing flexibility across the entire infrastructure that the business runs on now."

By using Chef, Marshall University is able to ensure that the university's operations are running properly and have positioned itself effectively for additional growth. The university envisions using Chef to deploy a next-generation campus web portal and to integrate configuration management with existing monitoring systems. Monitoring system information will be used to evaluate an entire year of outages and issues, as well as human configuration problems before and after Chef's deployment. Long-term goals include developing formalized change management policies that incorporate Chef, and ultimately including more people in the process of managing changes.

"Accuracy is essential when you are responsible for managing an entire infrastructure to ensure the business runs smoothly," said Adam Jacob, chief product officer for Opscode. "By leveraging Chef, Marshall University can take advantage of cloud infrastructure automation technology to accurately and flexibly manage its systems, allowing the IT team to invest time in solving more complex problems."

About Opscode

Opscode is the leader in cloud infrastructure automation. We help 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 engineer's 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. Opscode is headquartered in Seattle.  More information can be found at www.opscode.com.

About Marshall University

Marshall University is the oldest, and second largest, public institution of higher learning in West Virginia. Marshall offers 68 baccalaureate programs and 52 graduate programs to approximately 14,000 students, including 4,000 graduate and medical students. Marshall's mission is to provide innovative undergraduate and graduate education that contributes to the development of society and the individual. The university actively facilitates learning through the preservation, discovery, synthesis, and dissemination of knowledge. More information can be found at www.marshall.edu.

For additional information, contact:
Joni Kirk
[email protected]
(206) 282-4923 ext. 115

SOURCE Opscode, Inc.