Puppet Labs Raises $30M from VMware
Puppet Labs, a maker of data center automation software, announced that VMware bought a $30 million stake in the company. The investment will be used to strengthen the strategic alliance between the two firms.
Puppet Labs raised $46 million to date from VMware, Google Ventures, Cisco, Kleiner Perkins and several other big name venture capitalists. Its flagship product is an open-source configuration framework that is widely used by system administrators to manage Linux deployments, as well as other Unix-like operating systems, and Windows.
The platform caught VMware’s attention because the commercial edition extends the core product’s functionality to virtualized environments. Puppet Enterprise is already integrated with vSphere, but through the newly announced collaboration, support will also be added for vCloud Automation Center, vCenter Operations Manager and vCenter Configuration Manager.
“Puppet Labs is at the forefront of IT automation, and is a catalyst in the DevOps movement — accelerating service delivery and business agility,” said Ramin Sayar, Vice President and General Manager, Virtualization & Cloud Management, VMware. “This strategic investment and partnership will further accelerate the software-defined data center, and will allow a more extensive automation and orchestration solution across infrastructure and application elements for VMware-based private and public clouds, physical infrastructures, OpenStack and Amazon Web Services.”
Big Data Angle
Automation is one of the top priorities in big data today. Yesterday we posted the news about Hortonworks announcing their continued efforts to lead the market in automation in Hadoop with their sandbox announcement. Hortonworks launched a new trial version of Hadoop that enables users to run the analytics engine on a desktop with minimal setup. It’s infinitely more accessible than downloading and deploying the Apache versions of these projects.
DevOps CloudOps Angle
Puppet Labs is at the bleeding edge of cloud and DevOps. SiliconAngle founder John Furrier caught up with CTO Nigel Kersten at EMC World last year, and he didn’t exactly make a big secret of it. Kersten and Nick Weaver, an EMC technologist (now at VMware) who also took part in the interview, talked all about the advantages of using Puppet software in EMC cloud environments. The pair elaborated on the technical side of things, covered the technical challenges that they wish to tackle through the partnership, and described an open future for software-led infrastructure.
See the full interview below:
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