Puppet Labs has released Puppet Enterprise 3.0, which the company says is a major release of its IT automation software. As with previous versions, it can be downloaded and used for free on up to 10 nodes. Serialization improvements in the core Puppet engine and the addition of a centralized storage service with PuppetDB allows enterprises to manage double the number of nodes compared with Puppet Enterprise 2.8.
Puppet Enterprise 3.0 features dynamic discovery as a core part of its orchestration engine, which is fully pluggable and can discover nodes based on Puppet classes and Facter facts. External sources providing inventory management data can be added with a plugin. Other changes include a nearly 200% improvement in agent run times, while catalog compilation time has dropped by more than 60%.
Puppet Enterprise 3.0 also has improved support for modules from the Puppet Forge with support for parameterized classes, which makes more than 1,200 modules more reusable; they can be configured directly from the Puppet Enterprise console. Puppet Enterprise now supports more platforms, including RHEL, Windows, AIX, Solaris and all the major Linux distributions.
Enterasys Updates OneFabric
Enterasys Networks is refreshing its OneFabric Data Center with four new switches and major software updates. The Siemens-owned company is updating its unified architecture for automating data center fabric a month after launching its own software-defined networking ecosystem that integrates technologies from a variety of partners through an open API and flow-based ASIC architecture.
(click image for larger view)Enterasys
Enhancements to OneFabric include four new top-of-rack 7100-Series switches and 14 new switch modules for the S-Series Data Center/Core switches, as well as updates to its OneFabric Control Center. The two new families of S-Series modules, the S140 and S180, support dense 10-Gbit and 40-Gbit Ethernet deployments in the data center, while the new 7100-Series family of switches supports up to 64 10-Gbit Ethernet ports in a single rack unit. These new switches are aimed at high-density data center environments.
Enterasys’ OneFabric and 7100S switches are part of its SDN ecosystem and use its CoreFlow2 ASIC switching technology. CoreFlow2 includes a deep packet classification engine that enables the switches and routers to differentiate between types of traffic and what is using Port 80 to apply more granular controls for access control and quality of service.
Fluke Troubleshoots With OneTouch
Fluke Networks has updated its software for its OneTouch AT Network Assistant for troubleshooting BYOD and VoIP network issues with new capabilities to speed up problem identification and remediation. Features in Version 2 allow network technicians to isolate the root cause of end user wired and wireless problems, repair or escalate issues and validate performance and SLA compliance after any changes.
(click image for larger view)Fluke Networks
For BYOD management, the new OneTouch software now has automated Wi-Fi discovery capabilities, including the ability to detect 802.11ac devices, and Wi-Fi packet capture. Technicians can also make use of new wired and wireless performance tests to automate measurement and assessment of end-to-end path performance, while new inline VoIP analysis tests visibility into IP phone initialization and call control processes, as well as VoIP conversation quality.
Other updates to the OneTouch AT software include a multi-port statistic test and a new path analysis test.
Silver Peak Speeds Up Clouds By The Hour
Silver Peak Systems has made its cloud-ready WAN optimization software available in hourly increments directly from Amazon Web Services. The utility licensing complements the company’s existing perpetual and annual subscription licensing options.
The Silver Peak VX software, which can be accessed through the AWS Marketplace, features the ability to increase AWS throughput by minimizing packet retransmissions due to poor network quality, increasing responsiveness by accelerating the underlying transport, and securing data whether at rest or in-transit with AES encryption. The software supports all major hypervisors.
San Disk Upgrades Software For Windows and Linux
SanDisk has updated its FlashSoft software for Windows Server and Linux operating systems with support for multiple SSDs and SSD mirroring for "safe write-back" caching. The FlashSoft 3.2 server-side solid state caching software has increased caching capability and is aimed at helping customers using software for increasingly larger data sets, the company said.
FlashSoft 3.2 supports up to four separate caches on a single server, and SanDisk has increased the maximum size of each cache from 1 TByte to 2 TBytes, while the number of volumes supported by a single cache has increased from 255 to 2,048. FlashSoft 3.2 also supports data mirroring, using two identical SSDs for "safe write-back" caching. Data is written to both SSDs concurrently, so if one SSD fails, FlashSoft automatically flushes the data from the other SSD and switches to write-through mode, providing read-only caching until the SSD failure is fixed.
FlashSoft 3.2 is available now for Windows Server 2008 R2 , Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Oracle Linux, versions 5.5 and above. Pricing starts at $3,000.
NEXT: New releases and updates from Sepaton, Kemp, and EMC
