IT management services and hosting company Loudcloud Inc. last week rolled out Version 2.0 of its proprietary Opsware platform, incorporating new tools for content deployment, disaster recovery and operations auditing, officials said.
The deployment and recovery modules will improve the rollout and repair times of Web sites, hosted applications and IT back ends, while the auditing module will serve as a checks-and-balances system for Loudclouds infrastructure automation system, according to Tim Howes, co-founder and product operations president of the Sunnyvale, Calif., company.
With the code deployment tool, customers can reduce rollout times from several hours with the previous version of Opsware to about 30 minutes with Opsware 2.0, officials said.
The disaster recovery tool expedites IT rebuilding by reading advanced logging systems. For example, rather than logging what a Web site does or looks like, the tool will, instead, log how the site was originally built, avoiding reverse-engineering woes, officials said.
Meanwhile, the operational auditing module is a way for Opswares automation tool to look after itself, officials said. Each time Opsware makes a mistake or a customer adds previously unknown software, the system will add those variables to a database, which should aid future users, said Loudcloud Chief Architect Ray Suorsa.
“Certainly the deployment module is important to us because were doing lots of Java code,” said Steve Baunach, chief technology officer of direct materials procurement company BlackHog Inc., also of Sunnyvale. BlackHog has been a Loudcloud customer since last summer.
With new code deployment happening about every six weeks, Baunach said, “The deployment and auditing [modules] are very important because thats where all the risk is. To be able to drive that in ensures that less could fall through the cracks.”