Who’s On Phirst

Ops folks hate agents. Hate them. I was in the same camp back in my data center days. The reasons are pretty obvious, right? Who wants to have to install and maintain another piece of software on every server? No one. Not only that, but agents scare the bejesus out of people running production systems. A small program that executes commands locally from a remote source is super scary no matter what. Like clowns with fangs scary. Add in the chance for that little agent to go rogue and start consuming resources or leaking memory or hording ports and scary quickly morphs into dread.

With all the revolutions going on in server infrastructure agents are also becoming more and more inconvenient. Virtualized environments and cloud computing make the servers themselves much more ephemeral than in other days past. Maintaining agents to these here-today-gone-tomorrow servers, and all the references to them, and the configurations they require, is just too time consuming and troublesome. It’s a hold over architecture from days past when “server” meant a thing with a form factor and a fan, not dynamically allocated memory and processor time.

Phurnace doesn’t play that game. We connect over the network – no agents required. That gives us tremendous flexibility to fit into the existing infrastructure architecture of our clients. Also, it allows us to configure and maintain servers regardless if they are physical, virtual, or cloudy. Ultimately our customers don’t like being told how they have to do things – they want products that fit how they want to work, not have to work the way a product demands. Being agentless is part of our flexibility that let’s our customers do that. And of course, makes us far less scary.

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Last week the Phurnace team visited Las Vegas to attend IBM’s Impact 2009. We presented a “Bird’s of a Feather” talk and spent some great time with customers (current and future) at our booth and at dinners.

While at the conference, the most often asked questions were about WebSphere 7.0. It seems that the upgrade is getting rolled up into renewed IBM software contracts. This is turning out to be a surprise to our customers as they are now forced to move to WebSphere 7.0 a bit sooner than they had expected. The good news is that Phurnace can certainly help with their migration from previous versions of WebSphere to the latest. This Phurnace-enabled migration will eliminate the need to re-craft a customer’s deployment scripts. Migration to new WebSphere versions is an “impending event” that motivates many of our customers to act.

Also, we did get some questions about properties-file based configuration in WebSphere 7.0. I directed most of those folks to our previous blog entry about it. Though it does gladden our collective hearts that IBM has addressed customers concerns about WebSphere configuration, the customers we spoke to are still not happy. The major complaint we got was about the explicit nature of the properties files and the inherent messiness of properties files. Simplicity does not seem to have been a design objective on this new feature.

Specifically, if you want to extract configuration data, you have to explicitly tell wsadmin the Object that you wish to extract. Moreover, if you extract a large amount of data, the structure of the properties file is sequential, so edit at your own peril.

Finally, we got rave reviews about our IBM WebSphere Portal 6.1 support. Give us a call and we’d love to show it to you if you missed it at the conference.

Remember, kids: friends don’t let friends write scripts.

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We had a great time last week at IBM IMPACT.  Thanks again to everyone who came to our session or stopped by the booth.  We should have a posting later this week from Robert on thoughts about the show.

If you haven't had the chance yet, take a look at our press release from last week on how we can help companies "On-Ramp" their applications to the Amazon cloud. We collaborated with teams from Amazon Web Services, IBM WebSphere Portal and Ixion, LLC to put this together. Very cool stuff...

Finally, we have a little over a week before our webinar on the state of the Data Center and the Cloud with Rachel Chalmers from the 451 Group. Join us on Thursday, May 21st, at 11AM CST to hear all about it.

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