Who's Your Data?

In nature, it takes time for such relationships to form – on the order of a few million years. Fortunately, we humans can apply lessons learned from nature and elsewhere to our own circumstances in far less time. Thus, when it comes to information technology, millions of humanoids, even those whose paychecks come from would-be competitors like HP and IBM, Red Hat and Novell have recognized the benefit of working together on such projects as operating system kernels, web servers, name servers, developer tools, and many many more open source projects.

The same forces propelling Linux to its status as the fastest growing server platform are present and accounted for when it comes to systems management. At a macro level, systems management software has a lot in common with operating systems, with web servers, and with databases. Some of the key things these software categories have in common are:

1. A horizontal nature and, therefore, lots of potential users

Think about popular open source packages - MySQL, Linux, Apache, ISC BIND and DHCP. Now consider this - do a bank’s fundamental operating system, name server or web server requirements vary that much from a hospital’s, from a government agency’s? I’d argue no. Since the open source model NEEDS a lot of users to work, when you find an application where the basic user requirements don’t vary that much by industry, you’ve found yourself a potential good candi-date for open source.

2. Technical users

One reason, I think, that open source has not experienced, and may never see, broad adoption on the desktop is because most desktop users are not tech savvy. They really couldn’t care less how the software running on their machine is licensed, because they have absolutely no desire to customize it. When it comes to desktop and laptop computers, 90 percent or more of users follow the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” rule. In contrast, folks that manage corporate and government agency data centers ARE technical - they do like to look under the hood, tweak this, adjust that, tune this and optimize that. And for these folks, open source is bliss. Indeed, it is these technical types whom the popular open source mantra “closed source software is like buying a car with the hood welded shut” fits to a T. And the car analogy is very apt. For me, my wife, my mother in law, indeed almost everyone I know, our car’s hood might as well be welded shut for all the good we can do with it open. But, try to get a NASCAR team to buy a car with the hood welded shut. Folks in IT operations and data center management are the pit crew of America’s high-performance, technology-driven institutions and they need to be able to look under the hood. But, this is not to say that all enterprise software will necessarily be open source, because points one and two go together. So, while certain business software, like databases, operating systems, web servers, and systems management, are horizontal and so benefit from a huge pool of users, other types of software are much more niche. So, for example, I would not expect a company like Dassault Systems or Misys to face significant open source competition any time soon.

3. An initial market dominated by large incumbent vendors with integrated, proprietary products

This one is pretty obvious, and can be summed up with the truism “No one likes a bully.” And until Linux came along, that’s just how the dominant OS vendors acted, same for databases and same, too, for Systems Management.

Observing these facts, several open source systems management companies and pro-jects got together last year and founded the Open Management Consortium, or OMC, to promote awareness and adoption of open source systems management. These participating organizations leverage the open source model to develop very strong projects that deliver world-class, standards-based systems management capabilities. And users have voted with their mice by downloading Nagios, Webmin, OpenQRM, Puppet, NetDirector, Zenoss, OpenSIMs and many other open source management tools. As importantly, community members are developing extensions, plugins, fixes and modules around these projects, making them richer, more useful and more robust.

OMC is in the process of developing a user survey to solicit open and transparent feed-back on what users like and dislike about open source systems management. The sur-vey will be available on the OMC page by Mid-May.

Greg Wallace
EMU Software