rPath - rBuilder

Reference Code: 1E5D1B03-3D75-4406-B6C2-DDF4134AEDCD Publication Date: 20 August 2010 Ovum . Unauthorised reproduction prohibited The information in this document has been extracted from published Ovum research by a registered user of Ovums Knowledge Centers. Ovum holds no responsibility for the loss of original context and for any changes made to information following its extraction. Ovum does not endorse companies or their products. Ovum operates under an Independence Charter. For full details please see www.ovum.com/about/charter.asp For full details of Ovum's citation policy, see www.ovum.com/media/citation.asp All information was current at the time of extraction although the original content may have been subsequently updated. Please refer back to the website to view the most recent content and the original source of the information

By Roy Illsley

Abstract
As IT moves from being perceived as a provider of technology to a services provider that enables business users to drive the organization, the need for CIOs to be able to demonstrate that current resources are being deployed effectively is a fundamental requirement. To many in IT, automation is seen as the codification of run books, but as rPath demonstrates, its true potential is to transform the way IT manages its relationship with the business units and the technology. Recommendations: Scenario 1: The rPath solution is suitable for organizations where change is an ongoing process. We believe that for these users the ability to industrialize the process and procedures will result in improved quality of service at reduced cost. Scenario 2: Organizations that operate remote branch offices with no local IT capabilities require some method of managing these systems. rPath provides a black-box approach that allows remote systems to self-manage based on centrally defined standard policies. Scenario 3: Management of diverse heterogeneous systems that involve significant degrees of complexity can benefit from using the model-driven approach by providing a reference architecture and base standards that can be combined to meet any technology that is used as the target platform.

Key Findings
Strength Enables organizations to perform on-demand provisioning. Industrializes the operational management of systems.
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Information Manages the release lifecycle automatically to resolve dependencies. Supports a black-box approach to branch-office deployments.

Weakness Market awareness outside North America is low.

Look Ahead
Advances in application-development techniques enable new solutions to be generated quickly to meet business demands, but for the operational aspects of new solutions such as deploying them based on standard policies, the market has not kept pace. A gap therefore exists between the speed of development and the ability of IT operations, and the challenge is to industrialize the process of construction, deployment, and subsequent management of new systems. To address these challenges rPath uses a model-driven approach, which allows organizations to automate the processes and improve the speed and quality of any new service. A model-driven approach removes the need to manage image libraries because the image can be reconstructed from first principles.The model approach provides a reference architecture that can be compared to standard compliance requirements. Any remedial work to meet the standard is identified. Rather than a universal update, change and patch updates can be automated and targeted to systems that require changes. FUNCTIONALITY Solution overview rPaths solution to the challenge of industrializing the operational aspect of managing systems is the rBuilder product, which provides some of the key capabilities needed to enable the automation of the management of heterogeneous complex data centers.

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Fig 1: Technical architecture

Source: rPath rPath

Version Control The first capability that any automated management solution requires is the ability to roll back and roll forward changes. To enable this rPath developed a comprehensive version-control capability, which offers more than the standard source-code control-management approach taken by many application development solutions. rPath uses the different elements and characteristics of a system to categorize and version it. This includes information on the system manifests, the policy and configuration settings, the packages, the binaries, and the installation scripts. By combining all of these elements rBuilder can ensure comprehensive system version control. System Modeling While the core/base capability is the version controlling, the heart of the rBuilder solution is the model-driven architecture that allows rPath to understand all the defining policies and dependencies that make up a system. This ability provides a deep level of visibility into the systems, enabling rPath to manage the entire lifecycle of a system and provide organizations with the ability to target changes or patch updates to those systems that need it while leaving others unaffected. Ovum considers this to be a significant capability, but it has the potential to appear overly complex when compared to more traditional approaches. However, rPaths approach is more cost-effective and delivers improved SLAs by not applying changes to systems that do not need them. Hierarchical System Definition The hierarchical approach to defining the system provides organizations with the ability to componentize systems in layers that can then be reused. For example, a web server when deconstructed would consist of a standard OS build, the customized web server software, and
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have some capabilities removed or restricted. By using this approach administrators can ensure that the systems are updated by patching only the core base components once and targeting any bespoke patches where needed. Ovum believes this approach also supports the concept of localization where the environment has specific requirements. The other ability that the hierarchical method delivers is that groups can be defined so that system sets with common components can be established, such as all Microsoft Windows Server 2003 systems that use the same network gateway. Policy-Based Control One of the biggest issues with systems today is the need for them to be verified for some form of compliance regulation. By using the policy-based controls and hierarchical definitions in rPath organizations can check that a system is compliant by comparing it to a reference architecture based on centrally defined policies. The additional benefit of this approach is that a merge facility exists to combine two systems, but only keeping the best policies. Automation rBuilder provides a number of key capabilities to ensure that automation is enabled beyond the simple sequential execution of batch jobs.The first automation layer is the dependency discovery, which rBuilder performs by analyzing all the software components to construct a software supply chain. The supply chain is used to allow rBuilder to provide faster system build-times and validation by reducing the errors associated with component conflicts and unknown dependencies. The second key aspect of automation is derived from the versioning used in the software library that supports roll-back and roll-forward so that the rBuilder solution can take the appropriate action to maintain service levels as policy dictates. Release Lifecycle Management The use of an audited workflow capability allows rBuilder to help eliminate the problem of drift in system design and build. The solution gives all stakeholders the ability to operate from a common consistent definition, using access controls to apply more management traceability. Solution analysis Operational and Support rBuilder has an inbuilt workflow engine and existing workflows can be easily imported, which coupled with the simple user interface enables the construction and maintenance of policies to be performed without excessive additional administrative workload. Ovum considers that far from introducing an extra administrative burden the rBuilder solution if implemented correctly can reduce the IT resources needed to manage the estate, and can do this at an improved service level. Figure 2 shows a typical screen used to administer rBuilder.

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Fig 2: Typical user screen

Source: rPath rPath

Validation The ability of rBuilder to understand the concept of business priority and combine this with its knowledge of service-level performance is a capability that adds an extra dimension to the level of trust an organization will place in the hands of an automation tool. Ovum considers the automated dependency-checking capability to be an extremely useful and often overlooked feature that all such tools should employ. Level of Automation rPath takes a different perspective to automation than that of many traditional management-tool vendors. Its approach is to industrialize the operational aspects of the data center by componentizing the systems, enabling them to be intelligently managed.This approach requires organizations to challenge its understanding of automation. Ovum likes rPaths approach, but its message might not resonate with all customers because the marketing visibility of the concept is low when compared with other technologies. Reporting and Deployment The solution typically has a two-day proof-of-concept implementation, and provides immediate value in terms of business benefit. The reporting capabilities are an integral part of the entire solution, mining the knowledge to provide the visibility of otherwise obscure relationships, which rPath exposes and is a prime reason for organizations to use it. Ovum likes the rPath concept of easy integration with any existing reporting system because this enables organizations to extract greater value from mining seemingly unrelated pieces of information. Virtualization and Cloud

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rPath has developed an online community for its rBuilder solution where the challenges of virtualized and cloud-enabled workloads are debated. This inclusive approach to understanding a customers key concerns has enabled rPath to ensure it develops enhancements in areas that customers need and want. One cloud-based aspect that Ovum considers a very valuable approach is the brown-field adoption technique where an organization can take an external cloud platform solution such as Microsoft Azure and bring it back in house. Recovery The biggest advantage that the rPath model-driven approach provides is the ability to regenerate an image output on demand. Traditionally images need to be managed, catalogued, and then retrieved, but the rPath approach means the concept of the stored image is redundant because any image is recreated from its components based on the model. Ovum considers this to be a positive in terms of recovery, but it also means the model must be secured because the loss of the model represents a single point of failure. PRODUCT STRATEGY rPath has identified specific target markets for its technology. Ovum believes this will help it drive brand awareness as currently its market presence is low-profile, particularly outside North America. rPath considers its key target verticals to be gaming, media and entertainment, online financial, high technology, managed services, online brokerage, high-end financial services, and data processing. rPath operates mainly in North America, although it has several key customers in EMEA including Fujitsu UK and Ireland and CERN in Switzerland. rPath operates a two-market sales strategy. For enterprise customers this is achieved through a direct sales approach and accounts for approximately 70% of sales. The remaining 30% is via OEM arrangements for the ISV market. rPath has a number of key implementation and distribution partnerships including GlobalLogic, NEI, EMC, and IBM. Key technology partnerships include Red Hat, Novell, and Microsoft. rPath considers HP Opsware, BMC BladeLogic, and VMware Ionix (Fastscale + Configuresoft) as its competitors in this market, and Ovum would add that home-grown solutions also represent significant competition, albeit more silent. The solution has a simple licensing policy that follows the traditional annual subscription model per deployed instance (physical, virtual, or cloud). However, rPath allows up to 20 deployed instances free for trial purposes, which Ovum considers an excellent approach to encouraging wider use of the solution. We believe that when an organization discovers the benefits of a pilot project, it will want to deploy it more widely. rPath has an aggressive development program and intends to release rPath 6.0 by the end of calendar year 2010. This release will see specific enhancements to the business service management aspects of automating workloads, the version control of configuration details, and a greater ability to support the many new self-service models. Ovum agrees with rPath that only by pursuing this aggressive program can rPath maintain its position against its major competitors.

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IMPLEMENTATION rPath professional training services provide customized onsite courses covering topics for enterprises and ISVs. Training offerings cover enterprise application virtualization, appliance development, and software packaging featuring rPath products, technologies, and recommended practices. All training is delivered by rPath trainers that have hands-on experience of working with enterprise customers and of using rPath's products. rPath operates on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and 2003 as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, and CentOS. The solution is also available on-premise, as a dedicated hosted solution, and SaaS. The support offered by rPath comes in standard or premium versions. Standard support covers issues raised from 9am to 9pm Eastern Time (excluding rPath holidays) and includes answers and advice on: Customization of the rPath Release Automation Platform software Usage, functionality, troubleshooting, and customization of the Linux Services Packaging of third-party software in rBuilder Group creation and definition Release-management processes Other topics related to the process of creating an appliance Premium support covers issues raised any time of any day of the year (24x7x365) and includes the same areas of advice as standard cover. Implementation examples rPath provides extensive examples of customer deployments on its website. Examples include: Deployment example 1: Large Electronics Company A large electronics company uses rPath to automate OS platform provisioning and patching across 16,000 production servers. It wanted to maintain patch levels and compliance across its large-scale environment without adding headcount. Instead of individually patching 16,000 systems, rPaths deep system versioning allows it to patch common components once and then
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cascade those updates to the systems that use them. This dramatically reduces maintenance burden by eliminating redundant patching and updates. Deployment example 2: Large High-Tech Company At this large high-tech company, IT was under pressure to create and provision software stacks more rapidly for development and testing. It took between 10 and 30 days to manually provision new systems. Today it relies on rPath release automation to rapidly provision and update complete software stacks for development and testing. This has reduced the time spent from weeks to minutes. It can now produce and maintain diverse platform stacks on demand. In addition, dependencies are resolved at build time, which has virtually eliminated failed deployments. Deployment example 3: Sony Imageworks Like many companies, Sony Imageworks relies on hundreds of complex, diverse, and rapidly changing applications to deliver its innovations. These software stacks have varied application, middleware, security, and other specialized requirements, which keep OS teams busy provisioning and maintaining diverse Linux platforms. Sony is implementing rPath as a release-automation platform for low-overhead and highly controlled provisioning and update of diverse Linux platforms. Deployment example 4: Fujitsu Fujitsu develops and deploys thousands of custom and commercial applications as part of the software solutions it delivers to enterprise clients. The rPath release-automation platform gives Fujitsu the flexibility to quickly package and deploy applications to any target execution environment (physical, virtual, and cloud) internally and externally. It can package an application once with rPath and deploy it anywhere with no re-engineering or other rework.
Table : Contact Details rPath Inc 701 Corporate Center Drive Suite 450 Raleigh NC 27607 USA Tel: +1 (866) 508 6200 Fax: +1 (919) 851 3985 www.rpath.com
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Source: rPath

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