Cfengine Nova 2.0 Unveiled, Delivering Key Benefits to Bigelow Laboratory

Cfengine, a provider of versatile and lightweight data center management solutions, unveiled Nova 2.0 at the 24^th Large Installation System Administration (LISA) conference. The company has also announced that the solution is already being leveraged by Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences.

Nova 2.0 is designed to efficiently automate the provisioning, configuration management, auditing, compliance and policy enforcement for Fortune 2000 server environments. A configuration management breakthrough, Nova 2.0 leverages Cfengine’s open source, online community of user input to create a truly unique business-oriented datacenter solution.

Nova 2.0 will be on display in booth No. 210, LISA 2010 conference, San Jose, Calif., Nov. 7 through 12.

“Automating big heterogeneous server environments is time-consuming without using well-defined models and pattern-based solutions,” explained Cfengine’s CEO, Thomas Ryd, in a statement. “The ‘Big Four’ software providers try to replicate this process by acquiring their way to a better offering.

“However, the dozens of software purchases made by each company presents too many variations on hardware and software. This approach ultimately adds layers of complexity or worse— causes IT administrators to revert back to human intervention which inevitably increases problematic system errors that affect the entire business process,” added Ryd.

A scientific exploration observatory, Bigelow Laboratory is dedicated to the study of single-celled ocean microbes. The lab focuses on conducting fieldwork on the open seas and analysis of satellite images of global ecosystems. Primary research by Bigelow is focused on the biogeochemical process of the world’s oceans to advance the understanding of interactions between maritime ecosystems, global climate and the environment.

“At Bigelow Laboratory, we’re conducting important oceanic research in the 21^st Century,” said James Genus, system administrator, at Bigelow Laboratory. “We’re dealing with mission-critical, time-sensitive research everyday – so a failure to any component of our core IT infrastructure could be devastating.”

Bigelow Laboratory relies on Cfengine to provide policy-based configuration management system to deliver automated configuration and maintenance of computers. Cfengine’s fully automated solution can be used for all life-cycle phases with continuous maintenance and report, both on or offline on all major operating systems.

Customers like Bigelow Laboratory use Nova 2.0 to become an integral part of the next-generation intelligent revolution for data centers. The platform enables Bigelow to quickly set up and reserve an on-demand virtual network for scientists. The solution will also quickly load and manage configurations in a unified fashion, thereby reserving virtual networks and automatically bringing servers back up if they fail.

“Nova 2.0 represents the best-of-breed automation solution, bringing multiplatform repair and policy-based compliance to Fortune 2000 organizations,” said Thomas Ryd, Cfengine’s CEO. “Companies such as Bigelow Laboratory need an inexpensive commercial enhancement to accommodate new industry demands.”

The Nova 2.0 platform will run on Linux, Macintosh and Windows platforms. It has a semantic Knowledge Map to provide an improved reporting system with new compliance troubleshooting and business value reports. In addition, it offers a single consistent cross-platform approach to software deployment and management.

Essentially, Nova 2.0 keeps business services running without transparent solutions that sit between IT service operations and IT service management. As a result, it will reduce the amount of physical work performed by IT administrators.

This process virtually eliminates human-based configuration management errors. With automatic enforcement of policies, consistent operational views and cohesive visibility, Nova 2.0 can ease the network management burden for IT directors.