BMC acquires Realops

July 19, 2007 in Data Center Automation by admin | No comments

Today, BMC announced the acquisition of Realops to build up the datacenter automation capabilities:

RealOps AutoPilot products automate the business of operations allowing IT organizations to deliver higher levels of service at lower costs to business users. Built on the industry leading RealOps AMP (Automation Management Platform), AutoPilot solutions for Problem, Change and Service Management automate the repetitive, manual tasks IT staffs perform every day.

You will get more details on that blog soon.

BMC to acquire ProactiveNet

May 29, 2007 in Monitoring by admin | No comments

Today, BMC Announced the acquisition of ProactiveNet :

ProactiveNet provides a very pragmatic approach to root cause analysis by guiding the user along the process, reducing the knowledge required to diagnose events or alarms raised by various systems.

ProactiveNet’s patented Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is unique in its approach to data and event correlation. In the heart of this approach is the automatically learned and continuously refined understanding of what is normal and abnormal in the environment. ProactiveNet “learns” the normal operating behavior of an environment and creates dynamic “intelligent” baselines of the normal operating mode. The product then captures and correlates baseline abnormalities and dispersed data points that occur outside of that baseline.

On top of that, the integration of this product with BMC Service impact Manager, the Atrium CMDB, as well as other BMC products, is opening a wide range of exciting capabilities.

Opsware patent challenged

February 13, 2007 in Data Center Automation by admin | No comments

Yesterday, the Public Patent Foundation announced that they are challenging patent # 7,124,289 issued to Opsware in 2006:

The challenged Opsware patent claims methods for automatically configuring or installing software on a plurality of computing devices having different respective sets of software and/or configurations of operating parameters.

In November 2006, Opsware announced :

The patent — number 7,124,289 — covers the cornerstone of Opsware’s technology, the ability to automate the management of servers and network devices across a data center through model-based control. This innovation allows models of granular configuration information about servers or networks to be stored as records in a database and, as changes are made to any aspect of a systems configuration model, to push those changes to any relevant servers or network devices. This technique supports automation for even extremely large and global datacenters, and it provides a fast, efficient and cost-saving approach to ensuring consistency and compliance.

It’s not clear why this patent is challenged now. The patent was filed on October 31st 2000, but the argument made by pubpat is that various open source project existed before the filling date.

Parallels acquired by SWsoft

January 22, 2007 in MacOS, Virtualization by jc | No comments

According to this article, Parallels was acquired 3 years ago by SWsoft:

The tectonics of virtualization are shifting. It turns out that Parallels is not such a little company after all. About three years ago it was quietly purchased by an enterprise-focused virtualization company called SWsoft, a fact that has never been publicly disclosed until now.

SWsoft is providing Plesk, HSPcomplete, PEM and Virtuozzo, which seems to be the only virtualization related technology. It will be interesting to see if SWsoft applies its expertise in Self Service, Accounting and Billing to the VM Management space.

Open Source Virtualization solution for OSX

January 15, 2007 in Virtualization by jc | No comments

Today, VirtualBox announced the release of their product in the open source, using the GPL:

Jan 15, 2007. InnoTek today released VirtualBox Open Source Edition (OSE), marking an important milestone in the development of PC virtualization software. VirtualBox OSE is the first professional PC virtualization solution released as open source under the GNU General Public License (GPL). With VirtualBox, customers get the most versatile virtualization product on the market, both for enterprise and individual use. VirtualBox’ open source license allows everyone to contribute to the development of the product and customize it to suit individual needs. Backed by Europe’s largest team of virtualization experts, VirtualBox continues to be developed and supported.

Going through the screenshots, you can see that they have an alpha version of VirtualBox for OSX :

vbox_osx_alpha

 

Service Containers in Sun Grid Engine

January 8, 2007 in Data Centers by admin | No comments

During SuperComputing 2006, Sun announced the open source release of project Hedeby.

This project introduce the concept of service container:

A Service Container is a container for a service, functionality or application which can act with a variable amount of Resources. The Service Container acts as the bridge between the Service and the Resource Provider, relaying Service needs to the Resource Provider and commands from the Resource Provider to the Service. The Service Container is responsible for tracking the state and the resource needs of the Service.

There is a one to one relationship between a Service Container and a Service. The Service Container handles the life-cycle management of the Service and provides an access point for communications from the Resource Provider.

This concept provides a nice way to abstract middleware applications which are providing some level of distributed resource management, like Grid Engine, but also other “new application”.

Well done Grid Engine team (you have to work on those code names though ;-)

Killer app for Palm : Google Map

January 6, 2007 in Technology by jc | No comments

I have been using my treo 650 for a couple of years now, and I must say that the early days were really bumpy. Lots of reset, freeze, and so on. However, recently, it has been really reliable (after exchanging it 3 times). Few months ago, Google released a Palm version of google map for mobiles. I use it daily since then. I get the traffic every morning on my way to work, and it has proven very reliable.

In this picture, you can see for example a congestion on the southbound 101, around San Bruno.

Snap-C1C5B014

Or, I use it to find a restaurant or other business, I even get their phone number, and can call them from the same screen.

Snap-C1C5B085

And you can even get turn by turn directions

Snap-C1C5B0C1-1

If only it could tell me where I am right now …

Anyway, it really justifies the cost of the unlimited internet connection I have to pay Cingular every month.

Hat off to Bryce, the king of concept maps

January 5, 2007 in Architecture by jc | No comments

If you want to see an excellent way to represent complex concepts graphically, look at the work of Bryce on flickr .This diagram represent, after heavy Gobbledy Gook, the concepts introduced during a project I was leading. I must say that this work really helped communicate all the different objects and concepts.

You can read here Bryce’s version of Flickr user model, even better.

I’ve really appreciated working with you Bryce.

Open Source Network & Systems Monitoring survey results

January 5, 2007 in Monitoring by admin | No comments

Zenoss published the LISA 06 Survey Results on Open Source Network & Systems Monitoring:

The survey results included responses from over 100 LISA attendees both on paper surveys and via an electronic survey mechanism. Surveys were offered in the Zenoss exhibition booth, at the LISA Birds of a Feather Session: “Solving IT Management Headaches with Open Source Software “.

My main takeaways of this survey are:

  • Most pressing issues faced by administrators are monitoring, configuration, Patching & provisioning.
  • 65 % of the respondents plan to use OSS tools in the monitoring space and 36% for configuration.
  • the most popular tools are Nagios, MRTG/RRDTool, Snort and Nessus, of which none are for configuration management.

open source configuration automation

January 3, 2007 in Configuration Management by admin | No comments

While looking at some open source projects in the area of configuration management and automation, I stumbled upon several projects and links, which I think might be useful to the community.

Bcfg2, developed in the Argonne National Laboratory. Licensed under 2-clause BSD-style license

Bcfg2 allows you to describe and deploy complex configurations across pools of GNU/Linux and Unix systems, leading to a consistent, reproducible, and verifiable description of your environment. Bcfg2’s visualization and reporting tools aid in your day-to-day administrative tasks. Its unique analysis features help you cope with the ever-increasing complexity of your networks.

Cfengine developed by Mark Burgess from the Oslo University College, Norway. Licensed under GPL2

It is used to implement policy-based configuration management on open systems (Unix-like environments), through the interpretation of it’s own declarative language.

The program focuses on a few key areas that scripts tend to mishandle. From a single configuration files (or set of files) you specify, using classes, your network configuration; cfengine then parses the file and carries out the instructions, warning you about errors (or fixing them) as it goes.

You can think of cfengine as a very high level language, higher than Perl or shell: a single command can result in many hundreds of operations being performed on multiple hosts. You can also use it as a net-wide front end for ‘cron.’

Puppet developed by Luke Kanies, who founded Reductive Labs. Licensed under GPL

Puppet lets you centrally manage every important aspect of your system using a cross-platform specification language that manages all the separate elements normally aggregated in different files, like users, cron jobs, and hosts, along with obviously discrete elements like packages, services, and files.

LCFG developed by Paul Anderson from the University of Edinburg. Licensed under GPL.

LCFG is a system for automatically installing and managing the configuration of large numbers of Unix systems. It is particularly suitable for sites with very diverse and rapidly changing configurations.

For a discussion of the merit of each, see this post on The Changelog.

For some more information on the Large Scale System Configuration Workgroup, see the lssconf website.

Or the following article: Automating Network Administration, by Luke A. Kanies.

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