rPath Initiative Aims to Close the Application Deployment Gap

RALEIGH, N.C. — October 28, 2008 — rPath today launched its initiative to close the application deployment gap, proposing a lifecycle management approach for enterprise application virtualization that combines deployment speed and control. The rPath initiative is detailed in the just-released white paper, "Closing the Gap Between Apps and Ops: Leveraging Application Virtualization and Cloud Computing to Accelerate Business Value," now available for download.

The rPath initiative defines a new architecture to create and manage virtualized enterprise applications for faster, simplified deployment on premises or in the cloud. Decoupled from their operating infrastructure, virtual applications are self-contained images that can run on any virtualization platform, effectively compressing deployment cycles from months to minutes. Once deployed, the applications’ lifecycle management and maintenance are dramatically less complex and expensive, and the operational risks associated with security related patches are greatly reduced.

"The space between quality assurance (QA) and deployment is probably the most significant bottleneck in the delivery of enterprise applications," said Billy Marshall, rPath founder and chief strategy officer. "Bottom line, apps and ops just have different priorities. Apps is about speed and innovation. Ops is about operating stability, compliance, and cost control through standardization and stringent change management. Enterprise application virtualization eliminates the apps/ops bottleneck while accommodating the priorities of both groups."

"For companies deploying production applications, speed, complexity, and heterogeneity continue to be critical challenges," said Dana Gardner, president and principal analyst, Interarbor Solutions. "Enterprise application virtualization really helps knock down the complexity problem and speeds up deployment overall by keeping the focus on the applications. Application virtualization removes a lot of the struggle around diversity of operating systems, programming languages, and hardware. Instead, virtualization fosters business responsiveness and agility by providing a common and inclusive applications deployment methodology."

Closing the Gap
The new architecture for virtualized applications sits between the traditional worlds of application lifecycle management (ALM) and enterprise system management (ESM), providing a bridge that dramatically accelerates production deployment. By facilitating seamless collaboration between apps and ops, this architecture provides application development with the speed and flexibility they want, while ensuring IT operations has the control and predictability they need. In doing so, it allows organizations to dramatically grow the volume of virtual machines they're bringing on line, while mitigating the risk of chaos and untenable maintenance burdens that always accompany unmanaged growth.

"Cloud computing provides capabilities that allow all of us to become datacenter owners without the complexity and headaches of actually owning and managing a datacenter," said Kate Keahey, a scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, who leads the development of Nimbus, an open source implementation of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). "The appliance management software developed by rPath is helping us streamline the creation, management, and maintenance of virtual machines. This will allow scientists to deploy appliances easier and faster and thus accelerate discovery and innovation."

Detailing the Architecture
The new enterprise application virtualization architecture advocated by rPath includes the following integrated platform capabilities:

• Policy definition – providing capabilities for codifying policies that govern the quality, conformance, and completeness of virtual applications before they’re put into production.
• Policy enforcement – automating conformance checks as part of the build process to ensure virtual applications meet all preconditions for deployment.
• Build management – transforming working software into a self-contained image that includes all of the operating bits to run in any virtualized or cloud environment.
• Orchestration – facilitating the "handshake" with deployment management systems, ensuring the virtual application conforms to run time standards; and server capacity and network services are available for a successful deployment.
• Application maintenance – a scalable maintenance system that deploys updates to virtual applications in production, enabling rapid response to security requirements and feature updates and mitigating the risk of virtual machine proliferation creating unmanageable maintenance burdens.
• Lifecycle management – mitigates the risk of chaos and sprawl by letting companies manage versions, state changes, history, ownership, policies, service level, charge-back agreements, relationships and dependencies as part of the metadata package that travels with the virtual application.

Simon Crosby, CTO, XenServer product group at Citrix Systems, says, "Citrix has been very active in providing a virtualization infrastructure that enables applications to be rapidly deployed in the enterprise and the cloud. We believe that rPath is playing an important, complementary role in these spaces by promoting an application architecture that ensures rapid, controlled enterprise deployments."

About rPath®

rPath automates system provisioning and maintenance across physical, virtual and cloud environments. rPath's innovative release automation platform is based on the industry's only commercial version control repository for managing deployed software systems. The result is an easy-to-deploy and cost-effective automation solution for rapid, low-risk and low-overhead deployment and maintenance of complex software systems. rPath dramatically improves responsiveness to business lines, reduces compliance risks, and allows resource-constrained IT organizations to significantly reduce operating costs and "do more with less." Headquartered in Raleigh, NC, rPath has 80+ customers including some of the world's largest enterprises and ISVs. Visit www.rpath.com.

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