The Rise of the Programmable Data Center

As data centers become more common and more advanced, there's been a movement to automate and consolidate control of data center components, and an industry is starting to grow around it. "While VMware pushes a programmable data model based on its technologies, vendors such as Puppet Labs are making the case for a more platform-neutral approach. Puppet Labs has developed a declarative language for configuring systems that can be extended across the data center: the organization recently announced the creation of an open source project in conjunction with EMC, called Razor, to accomplish that goal. There’s already open source project known as Chef, created by Opscode, with a similar set of goals. In a similar vein, Reflex Systems, a provider of virtualization management tools, is trying to drum interest in VQL, a query language that the company specifically developed for IT pros."

Yes, it means something

[Anonymous Coward]

The article isn't very good, but I think it boils down to "infrastructre as code", whereby all of your infrustructre is definable through software. It has many advantages, including repeatability and version control. The idea has been around for a long time, but it is only now gaining traction.