Zenoss Inc., a leading commercial open source IT management company, today announced it has selected rPath’s rBuilder™ and the rPath™ Appliance Platform to deliver its solution as software and hardware appliances. Zenoss Core, the foundation of all Zenoss product offerings, is an open source IT monitoring solution that delivers the functionality to effectively manage the configuration, health and performance of networks, servers and applications through a single, integrated software package.
A software appliance is an application combined with a streamlined operating system, offered in a format that runs on industry standard hardware or in virtualized environments. Zenoss initially embraced the software appliance approach because the company needed a quick and easy way to allow potential customers to download and test Zenoss Core. To date, Zenoss deploys its solutions as software appliances (hosted on VMware Player, Server or ESX Server) and hardware appliances (with Zenoss Enterprise subscriptions).
“Before working with rPath, we built appliances on our own. However, the process was cumbersome and it was difficult to effectively build an appliance with a small enough footprint to keep download sizes manageable,” stated Erik Dahl, Zenoss CTO and co-founder. “rBuilder and the rPath Appliance Platform are ideal solutions as they allow us to create appliances that are small and can be updated easily.”
rPath’s technology enables Zenoss to quickly build and update its software and hardware appliances while keeping pace with the company’s rapid release schedule. In addition, the rPath Appliance Platform gives Zenoss the ability to provide its customers with a maintenance stream for its product as well as the underlying operating system. Zenoss can easily add and customize the Linux distribution to best meet its customer requirements.
“Zenoss already had a deep understanding of the benefits building an appliance would bring to their customers. rPath’s technology gives Zenoss a process-based, highly automated, repeatable and reproducible means for building and maintaining appliances,” stated Billy Marshall, rPath CEO and co-founder. “Once an appliance is built utilizing rBuilder, it can be re-deployed in another format without going back to square one in the development process. This enables Zenoss to offer customers flexibility in implementation.”
To learn more about Zenoss appliance deployment options visit:
http://www.zenoss.com/product/deployment.