Universities Embrace Open Source IT Monitoring
When The VAR Guy wants to see the future of technology, he heads back to college. There, he often spots hot emerging trends in IT. The latest involves 18 universities embracing GroundWork Monitor, an open source alternative to traditional network and systems management platforms. Here’s the scoop.
Open source and universities, it seems, have a love affair with one another. Big schools are developing Kuali, an open source platform for managing university finances and applications. Other colleges are lining up behind MySQL, the open source database that drives many Web 2.0 sites.
But today’s winner is GroundWork Open Source, which aims to disrupt the conventional market for enterprise systems management. While CA Inc., BMC, Hewlett-Packard OpenView and IBM Tivoli pack plenty of power, they also come with big price tags and lots of complexity.
In stark contrast, GroundWork is pushing simple, cost-effective open source approaches to systems management. Roughly 18 colleges and universities have jumped on the GroundWork bandwagon. True believers include the University of Wyoming and the University of Adelaide in Australia.
The VAR Guy has blogged a bit about GroundWork before, when a major HP OpenView integrator added GroundWork to its solutions portfolio.
More recently, our resident blogger new GroundWork was for real when he heard Tara Spalding — employee #4 at fast-growing SugarCRM — had moved to GroundWork as VP of marketing. Within software circles, Spalding is known as a can-do person who promotes the business value of open source.
Beyond Linux
While we’re on the topic of open source, there’s another key theme for VARs to note: Companies like GroundWork, Untangle and Digium prove that open source has moved well beyond the Linux niche.
Increasingly, solutions providers and managed service providers are testing or embracing open source solutions that strengthen IT security, ease network management and provide a foundation for next-generation IP phone systems.
Still, there’s room for improvement. GroundWork, Untangle, Digium and others will need more partners (integrators, VARs, MSPs, etc.) in order to scale their businesses and provide potential customers with peace of mind.
you forgot Sakai, the collaboration environment built on open source. Big following among universities.
When you mention Untangle, you should also mention Vyatta because it can scale to much higher levels than Untangle. This makes Vyatta a great fit for universities, while Untangle is still targeting the small business market. We are looking into using Vyatta at the university I work for.
http://www.vyatta.com/
Tristan Rhodes
In the arena that vyatta, untangle and pfsense operate in, the showstopper eventually becomes vendor disclosure.
There are some chip fabricators out there who sell into the security market who cannot seem to bring themselves to disclose sufficient information about their devices to enable their inclusion. Case in point, Cavium Networks. Their encryption hardware is selected by many vendors who agree to sign NDA’s. The problem arises for those who want to use the same hardware, but with open source systems. Almost impossible. Without the hardware support, it is difficult for commodity hardware to accomplish the same tasks at the same throughput.
You would think that hardware vendors, who already have a lock on the device itself would be failling all over themselves to make programming information available.
Hey Spenser: Vyatta and pfsense are new to The VAR Guy. He’ll give ’em a look.
I was about to download
I was about to download Ground Work Monitor Core but the last paragraph in the license agreement worries me – “Audit. While this Agreement is in effect and for a period of one (1) year after it terminates, GW will have the right
not more often than twice during any calendar year, on reasonable notice to Licensee and during normal business hours,
to conduct an audit of Licensee’s books, records, and supporting documentation that relate to any of Licensee’s
obligations under this Agreement.”
Anyone else see this as a show-stopper?