FiveRuns Introduces Industry-First Enterprise Management Suite for Rails

May 17, 2007; 02:22 AM
FiveRuns, a pioneer of enterprise-class management for Rails and other popular open source and commercial systems, today announced the general availability of RM-Manage, the first product offering within the FiveRuns Enterprise Management Suite for Rails. Built to integrate with the FiveRuns Enterprise Management Platform, the Enterprise Management Suite for Rails will ensure Rails applications are enterprise-ready, performing and available.

The Management Suite for Rails is the first and only solution to manage the full Rails application lifecycle, from automating the setup and maintenance of an integrated Rails development environment to ensuring Rails applications perform well in production. Following the release of the RM-Manage, RM-Install will ship in June. FiveRuns will complete the Management Suite for Rails with three additional products to help in the pre-production performance testing, deployment and end-to-end visibility of Rails applications.

“Just like our Enterprise Management Platform makes managing open source and commercial systems easy, we’re making it just as easy to start building and managing enterprise-ready Rails applications,” said FiveRuns CEO Steven Smith. “From the beginning our plan was to deliver application management on top of our Enterprise Management Platform. Since we had built our platform in Rails it made sense for us to address the growing market need for Rails management. We have a significant head start and a unique position in this emerging market.”

RM-Install, a free, multi-platform fully tested and enterprise-ready Rails stack, enables companies to instantly begin developing and deploying Rails applications, without the worry of installing, configuring or maintaining various integrated software components. RM-Install includes:

• A single integrated and tested Rails stack that includes up-to-date pre-compiled binaries for Ruby, Rails, MySQL, Apache, Lighttpd and many other important libraries
• Initial cross-platform support for Mac, Linux, followed up by support for Windows, FreeBSD and Solaris
• A stack management update component to keep your Rails stack current (used with the optional RM-Install maintenance subscription)
• A demo application that shows useful Rails and AJAX functions using the applications and libraries bundled as part of RM-Install

While building elegant and powerful Rails applications rapidly is important, ensuring they perform and are continuously available in production is equally important. RM-Manage integrates seamlessly with FiveRuns Enterprise Management Platform to monitor and manage the production performance of the following framework areas within Rails applications:

• Controller and action performance – analysis and statistics to help identify where an application is spending time
• ActiveRecord interactions – see which models are being invoked the most and which interactions are the slowest
• View performance and analysis – detailed information on global and individual view invocation and rendering performance
• Caching effectiveness – analysis and reporting on both fragment and page caching
• Database connection utilization – detailed analysis of an application’s use of database connections
• Transactional analysis – detailed visibility into transaction profiles and statistics

"FiveRuns' simple and elegant approach to managing our Rails applications and supporting IT infrastructure helps us quickly and easily identify and troubleshoot any performance problems," said FiveRuns customer Rick MacConnell, director of engineering at OVE.com, a Manheim-owned virtual marketplace for dealer-to-dealer and commercial consignor business transactions that occur outside of physical wholesale auto auctions. "We wouldn't think of taking a Rails application into production without the use of the FiveRuns Management Suite for Rails to help instrument and manage its performance."

“While the Rails development cycle and end result is rapid and rewarding, IT departments are not finding the tools for deployment and management that they're used to and often require,” said Michael Cote, analyst for Redmonk. “This either results in the need to hand-roll such tools or, worse, strongly discourages the use of Rails. The availability of more Rails deployment and management tools, along with support, has the potential to further spread the benefits of Rails and allow developers to focus on applications rather than bridging the management gap with IT.”

RM-Install will be free to download at www.fiveruns.com, with an option of annual maintenance for $49/year per server. RM-Manage is a separately priced add-on to the Enterprise Management Platform and will be offered on a subscription-basis starting at $20/month per server. RM-Manage requires the FiveRuns Enterprise Management Platform.

About FiveRuns: Enterprise Management for Rails

FiveRuns is a leading provider of enterprise-class management solutions for Rails, and other popular open source and commercial systems. Built on Rails and delivered as a hosted service, FiveRuns’ game-changing solutions provide relevant, intuitive and affordable management enabling organizations to save money and reduce operational complexity by managing the entire Rails application lifecycle – from installation to production. For more information or to download a trial subscription, visit www.fiveruns.com.

Copyright ® 2007 FiveRuns Corporation. All Rights Reserved. FiveRuns is a trademark of FiveRuns Corporation. All other trademarks, trade names, or company names referenced herein are used for identification only and are the property of their respective owners. Rails is a trademark of David Heinemeier Hansson.