At Dell we are excited to introduce Active System Manager (ASM) 7.5, a new type of converged system manager solution developed collaboratively with Puppet Labs. We're augmenting our Dell IP in response to challenges our customers face in building heterogeneous environments. Current ASM templates will be enhanced with Puppet’s declarative model-based approach to help us provision server hardware, along with the Dell IP we acquired from Gale Technologies. We chose this route and selected Puppet Labs because of the pervasiveness of their open source solution, which many of our clients champion.
As Puppet Labs’ CEO and founder, Luke Kanies, put it: "Industry leaders such as Dell look increasingly to Puppet to automate IT infrastructure. We view Dell's decision to use Puppet as strong validation of our technology and market leadership, and are excited to welcome the company as an active member of the Puppet ecosystem.”
At Dell, we recognized the need for a package that can provide greater heterogeneity in provisioning systems like UCS from Cisco and Matrix / ProLiant from Hewlett-Packard in addition to Dell hardware. We saw many of our customers being held back by the homogeneity of the many platforms in the market. By working with Puppet Labs, we are also taking a bigger role in the Razor open source community that was originally founded by Puppet and EMC. In so doing, we will be able to direct the real-time nature of Puppet Labs’ ability to automatically discover platforms and seamlessly hand off the discovery to ASM 7.5.
The user interface for ASM 7.5 will be based upon the project started by Dell’s End User Computing group, which enables a user to provision, orchestrate and manage a heterogeneous environment in a manner consistent with all Dell products. We are of the firm belief that this user interface will take Dell beyond any other product in the market now and in the future. It is remarkably easy for an administrator to use, and will make the management of Dell products, along with heterogeneous products, much simpler.
Dell and Puppet Labs will be demonstrating Active System Manager 7.5 at Dell World, taking place in Austin, Texas from December 11-13. We will showcase for our partners and customers how to discover the Dell environment, deploy a VDI environment, and how you can provision and manage the UCS platform from a Dell platform. We hope to see you there!