Dimension Data New Zealand has partnered with Chef, the company behind a configuration management software tool of the same name, to provide its clients with what it says will be continuous automation enabling them to achieve speed, scale, consistency and compliance of their hybrid IT environments.
Chef, says Dimension Data, “is the global leader in continuous automation software and one of the founders of the DevOps movement.”
Chef “works with the world’s most innovative companies to deliver their vision of digital transformation by providing the practices and platform to deploy software at speed.”
Dimension Data New Zealand’s head of digital practice Steve Wotten said the partnership would enable Dimension Data clients to rapidly increase the speed with which they can create hybrid clouds, without sacrificing security.
“Our partnership with Chef provides us with the expertise and tools to deliver a true hybrid cloud outcome at speed in a consistent, repeatable and secure way.”
He added that Dimension Data New Zealand had recently set up a cloud community of practice by forming partnerships with other companies providing services for hybrid cloud environments.
“Our consultancy, delivery and managed services expertise can be applied to new, agile solutions for clients who are increasingly looking for their vendors and partners to move as fast as they are,” he said.
Chef’s SVP of business development & channels, Kimberly Martin, said the combination of Chef's platform for infrastructure and application automation and Dimension Data's expertise would help accelerate clients’ digital transformation.
Chef’s APAC director of sales Paul Took said, “Automation should allow the IT team to focus less on building things and more on collaborating with the business. When IT starts to automate some of these tasks, they become the enabler, allowing the business to respond faster to market needs and customer feedback.”
What is Chef?
Chef, according to Wikipedia is a configuration management tool written in Ruby and Erlang and is used to streamline the task of configuring and maintaining a company's servers.
It can integrate with cloud-based platforms such as Internap, Amazon EC2, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud, OpenStack, SoftLayer, Microsoft Azure and Rackspace to automatically provision and configure new machines.
Originally written for Linux environments, it new also supports Microsoft Windows.