Quick cfengine poll...

[Andrew Mayhew]

Internal to the company that I work for we have been going over a
process of evaluation the direction our system management is going to
take.  Currently we use cfengine, but there seems to be a large push,
primarily from our Software Engineering group to develop something
from scratch ourselves.  Seems to me to be a big wheel reinventing
project and will take a lot longer than they anticipate. Their major
contention is that cfengine is not a valid enterprise management
system and that it was never designed as such.  Or in their words:

     Overall general design of Cfengine followed an evolutionary
        process that did not initially target large-scale enterprise
        architectures. Any eventual support for large-scale enterprise
        functionality was added over time without a fundamental redesign
        of Cfengine.  In order to effectively guarantee use in a
        distributed enterprise environment, it may very well be necessary
        to make deep fundamental design and implementation changes to
        Cfengine to address the technical and business requirements for
        Provisioning 2.0.

They also seem to have problems with cfengine's ability (or in their
view lack of ability) to scale to very large scale systems.  Could any
of you out there give me some numbers in terms of systems which you
are managing with cfengine.  Something like a cfengine client to cfd
server ratio would be greate.  Anyone with systems spread over a wide
area would also be a plus since in our situation we have host systems
in various places around the US and Europe.

I really believe that thier arguments are invalid and any support that
I can get would be appreciated.

Thanks-
Andrew Mayhew