Hi David,
At a very high abstraction level, puppet and lasic have similar intentions. Lasic, however, approaches the problem differently. It might not be worth exploring that, however, as lasic has really languished over the last few years; myself and others just haven't had the time to devote.
A system I might recommend that you explore is
http://www.ansibleworks.com/ -- it's intentions and mechanisms are similar to Lasic's original goals, but it has the luxury of active user base development :)
Hope this helps.