With Deliver 4.0, Phurnace Software Starts to Look Like a Cloud Foundry

Event Summary

• Phurnace identifies a gap between the build process, where version control systems and build automation can help, and IT operations, where provisioning and change and configuration automation are well established. Deployment is now the problem.
• Now in version 4.0, Phurnace Deliver supports IBM WebSphere Process Server, Tomcat, Eclipse's Galileo release and usability enhancements that include wizards, better dependency mapping with visualization and a Phurnace API for deeper integration.
• Still to come: products targeted at the cloud. Phurnace will start with Amazon Web Services and add other public clouds as customers demand them. It's hoping to win the hearts and minds of Global 1000 enterprises that use clouds for dev and test.

The 451 Take
It is not yet clear how clouds will be used in the enterprise, but it is likely they will underpin J2EE applications. If that does turn out to be true, the sheer scale and speed of elastic cloud deployments will preclude hand-coded provisioning. Something like Phurnace Deliver will be required. The company is far from the only one to have had this insight, but by integrating with the leading Web application servers, Phurnace hopes to get the drop on its rivals.

Details
Phurnace Software was incorporated in 2006, although product development began in 2005. The first multiplatform GA release of its installation and deployment management software came in 2008, and an enterprise sales team was hired in 2009. Phurnace's technology seeks to automate the process of deploying J2EE applications. It replaces the way this is usually done today; i.e., through laborious manual processes or, at best, by hard-to-maintain custom scripts. As the newer features and products are released, Phurnace should work equally well in physical, virtual and cloud environments.

Phurnace Deliver aims to offer fully automated configuration and deployment for J2EE applications. It supports WebSphere, WebSphere Portal, WebLogic and JBoss applications. It is agentless, and no scripting or manual intervention is needed. The software offers an Eclipse user interface or CLI, and can be integrated with IBM Build Forge, Hewlett-Packard Server Automation (formerly Opsware), BMC BladeLogic, IBM Tivoli and Electric Cloud Electric Commander.

The software configures and deploys the applications that run on J2EE Web application servers. It lets the application deployment team preview the effects of configuration changes; migrate applications between different versions of a Web application server; compare working to broken servers; create an inventory of images; and compare and deploy configurations across test, development and production environments. Existing configurations can be audited to make sure they comply with baseline policies.

Competitive Landscape
While we don't see any direct challenges to Phurnace in on-premises, physical and virtual application deployment, the cloud is another story. One-time virtual appliance vendors like Cohesive Flexible Technologies, Enomaly and rPath are staking their claims. Cohesive's Elastic Server is a Web-based application factory for building custom stacks and servers. With the company's VPN-Cubed, it is positioned as an on-boarding package for virtual and cloud computing. Enomaly's Elastic Cloud Platform (ECP) also offers an automated provisioning engine that configures, manages and deploys groups of virtual machines. Taken together, rPath's rBuilder and rPath Lifecycle Management Platform are designed to automate the creation and deployment of application images.

Still, other vendors are encroaching: AppZero, the renamed Trigence, for example, or the clever FastScale Technology, which was just picked up by EMC. Additionally, there are cloud on-ramps of various stripes, like Eucalyptus and RightScale. Finally, there's Cloud Foundry, bought by SpringSource just before SpringSource itself was acquired by VMware. Cloud Foundry foregrounds Spring and Rails, but its Java domain knowledge might just rival Phurnace's own.