PORTLAND, OR--(Marketwire - April 6, 2011) - Puppet Labs™, a leading provider of open source systems management solutions, today announced that Swisstopo uses Puppet as its systems management solution for its cloud computing infrastructure. Swisstopo, the Swiss Federal Office of Topography, is Switzerland's national cartography agency and is responsible for all of Switzerland's geographical data. In order to make their geodata widely available in both physical and digital forms, Swisstopo chose Puppet to simplify their infrastructure's transition to the cloud.
Last year, Swisstopo's Federal Spatial Data Infrastructure (FSDI) team had a 70% cloud and 30% physical infrastructure. Their servers were each set up to perform every task in the organization, causing dependencies between their complex servers and exposing them to the risk of system failure. Additionally, cloud computing is not widely used in Switzerland, and with the FSDI's entirely open source software stack, their system administrators had major concerns about using closed or commercial software. Ultimately, Swisstopo chose Puppet because it offered the easiest and most efficient way to increase the consistency and reduce the complexity of their servers. They also knew Puppet's performance was proven because the biggest IT supplier to the Swiss defense department was already using Puppet. By the end of 2010, FSDI had achieved their goal of moving their integration and production servers to the cloud.
Puppet allowed Swisstopo to ensure consistency by eliminating operating system accountability problems and improve overall performance by enabling them to delegate different tasks to different servers. Before Puppet, it used to take Swisstopo two to three months to get a new server, and two to three weeks to provision it. With Puppet doing the configuration, a server in the cloud became just a few clicks away, with set-up time cut down to under an hour. Swisstopo also took advantage of Puppet's community for support; because there were many modules already written for common tasks, the modules required minimal editing to perform on specific operations, allowing them to quickly utilize Puppet for advanced tasks. Finally, Puppet made sure documentation was always up to date by default, so Swisstopo could easily audit their entire infrastructure and track changes over time.
"The biggest benefit from our investment is not from moving to the cloud, but more that we have 'Puppetized' our servers," said Hanspeter Christ, the deputy head of the Federal Spatial Data Infrastructure, a division of Swisstopo. "We have become more efficient in provisioning servers, so we can easily get 100 of them up and running in a very short time."
"As more organizations move to the cloud, they are recognizing that consistent and efficient systems management is often the key to successful deployments," said Luke Kanies, CEO of Puppet Labs. "Puppet's model-driven approach makes infrastructure portable, which is ideal for cloud projects such as Swisstopo's migration to EC2."
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About Puppet Labs
Puppet Labs (www.puppetlabs.com) develops and commercially supports Puppet, the leading open source platform for enterprise systems management. With millions of nodes under management and thousands of users, including Twitter, NYSE, Zynga, Genentech, Match.com, eBay, NYU, and Oracle, Puppet standardizes the way IT staff deploy and manage infrastructure in the enterprise and the cloud. Headquartered in Portland, Oregon, Puppet Labs is funded by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, True Ventures, Radar Partners and Emerson St. Partners.
About Swisstopo
The Federal Office of Topography (Swisstopo) is the centre of competence for the Swiss Confederation responsible for geographical reference data such as the description, representation and archiving of geographic spatial data like national maps, elevation and landscape models, satellite images, orthophotos. In co-operation with the federal government, cantons, local communities and the private sector Swisstopo makes geodata available for widespread use.
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