rPath Initiative Aims to Close the Application Deployment Gap

White Paper Outlines Lifecycle Management Approach for Enterprise
Application Virtualization That Combines Deployment Speed With Control
RALEIGH, N.C.--(Business Wire)--
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," available for download at
http://www.rpath.com/corp/closing-the-gap.

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."

For more information on rPath, please visit http://www.rpath.com.

Recent News and Resources

Whitepaper: Closing the Gap Between Apps and Ops;
http://www.rpath.com/corp/closing-the-gap

Cloud Computing Adoption Model;
http://www.rpath.com/corp/cloud-adoption-model

-- News release: http://www.rpath.com/corp/news-and-events/259

-- Framework:
http://www.rpath.com/corp/images/stories/other/rpath_ccam.pdf

-- Webinar replay: http://searchvmware.bitpipe.com/data/
document.do?res_id=1223392684_910&asrc=SS_BSS_HOME

-- Analyst whitepaper:
http://www.rpath.com/corp/images/stories/white_papers/
wp_forresterfutureview.pdf

-- Commentary:
http://blogs.rpath.com/wpmu/closing-the-gap/2008/10/23/
the-cloud-computing-adoption-model-eating-the-elephant-
one-bite-at-a-time/

About rPath

rPath is the pioneer and leader in technology for virtualizing
software applications and managing the complete lifecycle of virtual
appliances and application images. ISVs and enterprises rely on
rBuilder and the rPath Lifecycle Management Platform to automate the
creation, configuration, conformance, management and maintenance of
application images for virtualized and cloud computing environments.
By producing application images that are optimized for any hypervisor,
rPath frees the application from the underlying hardware, and enables
a more efficient, lower cost model for development, maintenance and
support and dramatically accelerates application deployments. rPath's
end-to-end technology simplifies the entire range of lifecycle
management activities for application images, while promoting
scalability in response to dynamic demand. rPath is headquartered in
Raleigh, NC. Visit www.rpath.com.

rPath is a registered trademark of rPath. All other brand names
and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their
respective companies.

TECHMarket Communications for rPath
Marisa Lam, 650-544-3350
Marisa@TECHMarket.com

Copyright Business Wire 2008