Advance Digital Manages Hundreds of Private Cloud Servers With Puppet Enterprise

PORTLAND, OR--(Marketwire - May 10, 2012) - Puppet Labs™, the leading provider of IT automation software for system administrators, today announced that Advance Digital, Inc., a leading creator of digital information and connection solutions for local consumers and businesses with 11 media properties across the U.S., uses Puppet Enterprise to deliver best-in-class operational agility and efficiency of its VMware private cloud computing infrastructure. As a result, Advance Digital's media properties are able to respond rapidly to spikes in consumer traffic and see orders of magnitude improvement in site availability.

Prior to Puppet Enterprise, Advance Digital had been long-time users of IT automation in the form of custom scripts. However, the increased node counts driven by virtualization outstripped the practicality of their homegrown tools and motivated them to explore next-generation technologies. Advance Digital considered many solutions, but when they saw the traction Puppet had gained along with Puppet's community backing, Advance Digital chose to adopt Puppet Enterprise. With Puppet Enterprise, the process of provisioning a server was cut down to hours. Furthermore, having automated their release management processes with Puppet Enterprise, Advance Digital can accurately and quickly deploy software updates, leaving the heavy lifting to Puppet Enterprise.

Configuring and managing their infrastructure with Puppet Enterprise also decreased the time to market of new releases and updates from developers and allowed system admins to not worry about monitoring every individual server's activity. Whether the servers needed identical configurations or lifecycle-specific ones, Puppet Enterprise's model-driven configuration management makes this an easy process for Advance Digital.

"We've been fans of configuration management for a long time, since seven or eight years ago," said Matthew Jaeger, VP of Technology and Operations at Advance Digital. "We chose to go with Puppet Enterprise because we wanted and needed a solution that delivered not just productivity and agility but insight as well. We wanted to be able to actually see the changes happening, and 'puppetizing' our servers really allows for that kind of visibility into our infrastructure."

"Puppet Enterprise is not only about providing a powerful yet easy-to-use IT automation solution to companies, but also providing them with important insight into changes occurring in their infrastructure," said Luke Kanies, founder & CEO of Puppet Labs. "Advance Digital is leveraging the power of Puppet Enterprise, resulting in the ability for system administrators to automate away the menial tasks and direct their efforts to those projects that bring value to the business."

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About Advance Digital
Advance Digital, Inc., based in Jersey City, NJ, provides digital information and connection solutions for local consumers and businesses. The company operates 11 media properties across the U.S. that are the number one local news, information and community hubs in the markets they serve. The sites include cleveland.com, al.com, gulflive.com, NJ.com, NOLA.com, OregonLive.com, SILive.com, syracuse.com, MassLive.com, PennLive.com, and lehighvalleylive.com.

About Puppet Labs
Puppet Labs, Inc. was founded in 2005 and shipped the first release of the open source Puppet Project later the same year. The popularity of Puppet Labs' IT automation solution has since grown to where it is now responsible for managing millions of nodes across thousands of organizations, both on-premise and in the cloud, including Zynga, Citrix, Shopzilla, Match.com, Oracle/Sun, to name a few. Now numbering sixty employees and based in Portland, Oregon, Puppet Labs is backed by Cisco, Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Radar Partners, True Ventures, and VMware.

Puppet Labs and Puppet are trademarks of Puppet Labs Inc. All other company and product names mentioned are used only for identification purposes and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.