Puppet Labs and Huawei Collaborate 

Puppet Labs, the leading provider of IT automation software, today announced at Huawei Network Congress 2015 that it is partnering with Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, to bring native Puppet support to Huawei networking devices. This partnership marks Puppet as the only configuration management solution on Huawei networking devices and the standard for software defined networking (SDN). Beginning with the CloudEngine series of switches, Huawei will pre-install Puppet Enterprise agents on CloudEngine devices and will develop Puppet modules on the NetDev standard, allowing customers to bring their Huawei networking devices under Puppet Enterprise control from day one. Joint customers can now extend Puppet's management throughout the datacenter, making SDN and its benefits a reality.

"Enterprise adoption of SDN can lead to several benefits that will fundamentally impact how networks are designed, built and operated. For example, early mainstream SDN adopters have achieved capital expenditure (capex) savings of more than 90%, reduced provisioning times by over 90%, while simultaneously lowering operating expenditure." - from Gartner's 04 December 2014 report, Predicts 2015: Enterprise Networking and Network Services.

Huawei is a leading provider of networking devices in Europe and Asia Pacific, representing thousands of organizations that were previously unable to benefit from Puppet Enterprise for automating network configurations.

"Huawei is now proactively participating in building an open cloud ecosystem, aiming at putting forward the most advanced, comprehensive, and competitive cloud data center solution," said Swift Liu, President, Switch & Enterprise Communications Product Line, Huawei. "Together we will carry out joint R&D and promotion of cloud data center automation to help our customers implement automatic deployment and unified management of cloud data center networks."

The Huawei developed Puppet module will be built on NetDev, a Puppet Labs maintained standard that provides a configuration language for common network configuration resources. These modules will provide the flexibility to manage everything from switch configuration to interfaces, VLANs, and trunks.

With the native agent and Puppet modules developed under this partnership, joint customers will be able to:

• Reduce provisioning times of new applications from weeks or even months to minutes or seconds.
• Unify previously siloed network and infrastructure teams and tooling under one change process.
• Provide one tool, Puppet Enterprise's Event Inspector, to gain visibility into all infrastructure changes, versus reporting tools specific to the networking components.
• Increase infrastructure reliability and consistency by greatly minimizing human error.
• Enforce a DevOps culture through shared process, visibility, and contribution.

"Our partnership with Huawei shows that Puppet is becoming the common language of the data center around the world," said Luke Kanies, founder and CEO of Puppet Labs. "Huawei is committed to making Puppet Enterprise the way to manage their networking devices in a world where holistic data center automation is required. So whether it's linux machines in a private cloud, containers in AWS or a Huawei switch in your infrastructure, you have the same repeatable, consistent way of quickly and reliably delivering new services and applications."

The Puppet Supported Program demonstrates a joint commitment to equipping customers with the tools to manage their infrastructure at the highest levels of reliability and performance. Puppet Labs and its partners have committed to creating joint solutions that enable automation of both platforms and devices with Puppet Enterprise. The Puppet Supported Program's rigorous certification process delivers customers the benefits of fully tested and supported automation of all leading hardware in today's data centers.