Who’s On Phirst

Phurnace is a Silver Sponsor next week at the IBM IMPACT 2009 conference. The conference is focused on SOA and the leveraging of WebSphere products – WebSphere application server, WebSphere Portal, WebSphere Process Server, and more. There are even going to be sessions and announcements related to IBM and Amazon and the cloud platform AWS, including some exciting news on this topic from Phurnace.

We found this to be a great event last year. It was good to connect face to face with our customers and our prospects. We generated good quality sales leads and the audience was perfect for us. I encourage any WebSphere system admins or IBM Portal customers to stop by and see us in our show floor booth or join us Monday morning for a “birds of a feather” session that will discuss how to eliminate your deployment scripts and the headaches that they present . We will be demonstrating the deployment of java apps into WebSphere, the management of updates and changes to IBM Portal and how to use Phurnace as an “on ramp” into the Amazon cloud (Amazon Web Services).

Finally, set a meeting with us if you plan to be there. If you would like to reserve a time slot or just want to let us know that you will be there for us to keep an eye out, please email jessica.gass@phurnace.com. She will make sure you connect with all of the right Phurnace people. This is a must go conference if you are a WebSphere user. If you don’t have your ticket, go online and sign up now. You shouldn’t miss this one.

In WebSphere
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You may have already heard the news that Oracle has made a bid for Sun. The IBM acquisition deal fell through two weeks ago. In my opinion, it looks like the market is making a slow move back to the one-stop-shop “system house” approach. IBM, HP, Oracle/Sun and maybe soon Cisco, will all offer systems with hardware, software and services. Is this a trend toward a conservative IT approach? “I want one vendor responsible for my environment?” “I don’t care if all the pieces are best of breed, I just want it to work together and lower my TCO.” We shall see.

The pendulum swings again. This has happened throughout my long career in the computer and software industry. The current buzz around cloud computing fits this mind set as well. “I don’t care what it is or who it is from, just make it work and charge me just for what I use.”

The challenges of system and data center management will not go away, however. This latest consolidation move will just bring them in to the limelight again. The future is bright for data center automation tools. Customers are demanding that complexity be reduced and big systems vendors are making promises that they will answer the call. Phurnace Software is in a good place. Our customers know that we can make their deployment process much, much more simple and for sure – pull out real costs.

It will be intriguing to see what else happens in this “system house” building era. SAP? Cisco? BMC? CA? Dell? Microsoft? Are they next? And don’t think that Amazon and Google don’t have a grand plan up their sleeves. Should be interesting.

In Untagged 
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I know everyone hates it when the Marketing person posts a blog but we have some very interesting webinars coming up soon that I wanted to share with everyone. Please forgive the Marketing fluff as the content of these webinars will be very valuable.

WebSphere Portal Customer? - The first webinar is great for anyone using or considering using WebSphere Portal. We have a speaker from IBM, Richard Gornitsky, who is the Chief Architect for some of the largest WebSphere Portal engagements. He will give us some insight into how customers are deploying applications on Portal today. Daniel Nelson from Phurnace will explain how we can help simplify and speed up those processes. This one is coming up soon so register and get it on your calendar now!
April 30, 2009 Webinar - Help! I Need to Automate the Deployment and Configuration of My WebSphere Portal Applications.

Considering the Cloud? - Rachel Chalmers from the 451 Group will be giving a current state of tools and her big picture view and in the Data Center Automation space and how the cloud fits into that big picture. She will also discuss the "gap" that exists between Dev and IT Ops when web apps are handed off. Daniel Nelson from Phurnace will explain how Phurnace fills that "gap" with deployment automation and how we enable the on-ramping of applications into the cloud..
May 21, 2009 Webinar - The Automation Gap - Its Impact on the Data Center and the Cloud

Looking to Cut IT Costs but have Run Out of Places To Do So? We have the answer. The title and details aren't available for this webinar yet but check back soon because we have Eveyln Hubbert from Forrester joining us to talk about that exact topic.
June 18, 2009 Webinar - Title, Detials, Registration to come

In WebSphere Portal, Data Center Automation, Cloud Computing
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Among all the questions about putting your business apps into the cloud, the one that is most perplexing is what do you do with your existing database? After all, you have an existing infrastructure. You have processes. You have a DBA resources. Why uproot all that effort for some silly Java application and this Cloud nonsense?

Well, now you don't have to. Google officially announced today that they are going to allow Java to run on their App Engine. But, just as interesting, you will be able to connect to your back office database behind your firewall using Secure Data Connector (SDC). Besides activating SDC from your control panel, you'll have to install the SDC client on your network and allow it network access to your DB. Think of it as GoToMyDB.

Of course, there will always be a DBA that will squawk about this because it's just different from the way they do things today. But, you simply can't argue with Google's commitment to eliminating objections to using their App Engine instead of hosting your own applications.

In Cloud Computing
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A few weeks ago, whurley turned me onto Puppet. Puppet is a systems management framework that allows its users to concentrate on WHAT they want to accomplish and not HOW. Moreover, Puppet configurations can be applied over-and-over again without any concern.

Obviously, I'm a huge fan of this approach as this is what Phurnace Deliver does for your Application Servers. By allowing these configurations to be applied to your servers, regardless of state, you are no longer in the business of keeping track of the state of your servers. When in doubt, just run Puppet or Phurnace Deliver with the latest configuration and your server will be "caught up". Moreover, if you have a base image that is kept up-to-date, you can then redeploy your applications and configurations using a combination of Puppet and Phurnace Deliver. This frees you from having to patch your running instance. Simply fire up another copy of your base image, install the software and patches and deploy your Java application with Phurnace Deliver. Then, you can simply use the load balancer to move new sessions to the updated server.

With this approach you get so many benefits:

• avoid downtime during updates
• automatic disaster recovery without extra effort and
• no more image sprawl and associated management hassles.

You can read more about this over at Luke Kanies' blog. He does a great job of describing this approach for handling virtual images or servers in the cloud.

In Puppet
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