Starting in 2009 popular, autonomic configuration management tool, Cfengine will be commercially supported by a company formed by Cfengine author, Mark Burgess. Cfengine has a laundry list of brand names that are using their software –AT&T, Bloomberg, IBM, Nokia, and many more. I suspect that many of them would pay for commercial support:

Here’s the news from the newly formed Cfengine AS:

Following 5 years of research and development under the technical direction of its long time author Mark Burgess (a professor of Network and System Administration at Oslo University College), the recently formed support company Cfengine AS today released a major upgrade of the Open Source, self-repairing software cfengine based on its innovative Promise Theory technology.

Unlike would-be alternatives, cfengine is not about producing alarms and reports to notify about errors and misalignments in the Data Center: it is a fully self-repairing maintenance engine capable of fixing them without human intervention. Cfengine users know that systems are compliant and maintained even when humans are unavailable, because they have made all the important decisions in advance.

Cfengine is open-source (GPL) software for configuring, monitoring and autonomically maintaining computers. It’s been around for over 15 years and is pretty prevalent among Unix administrators with a lot of machines to manage.  The concept around CFengine involves having a centralized configuration that can propagate out to servers a common use would be to develop a template or set of templates that can be used to “build” a server.

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Technorati Tags: Cfengine, Configuration Management, JeOS, Open Source, Puppet, Red Hat, Reductive Labs, Systems Management, Thin Crust, Ubuntu

A few weeks ago I felt a little like a proud pappa, well maybe more like an uncle since I can’t claim to have been present for the conception. NetDirector, an open source configuration management tool that I helped get off the ground has finally been released under the GNU Public License making it a bona fide open source application (it was previously licensed under the NetDirector Public license — the Mozilla Public License with an attribution clause).  NetDirector is a web-based Unix system administration tool that provides the ability to centrally manage  services. The thing that’s makes NetDirector unique is it’s ability to simultaneously manage multiple servers at once from a graphical interface. In comparison to the very popular Webmin which can configure many different services and server attributes but maintains a one-to-one ratio.

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Technorati Tags: Configuration Management, GUI, NetDirector, Project Spacewalk, Puppet, Systems Management

Last year open source analyst Michael Coté of Redmonk coined the term Little Four to describe four up-and-coming open source management vendors and as a foil to the Big Four of systems management.

In the open source space, the 4 names that come up each time — usually from people I’m talking with even before I say anything — are: Zenoss, Hyperic, GroundWorks, and openQRM.

This week Qlusters/openQRM announced they would no longer be developing their open source project openQRM and leaving it to the community at large. I guess that leaves the remainder of the band of four to be labeled the “Little 3″. This isn’t all that surprising. The Qlusters team that originally launched openQRM is gone. Ofer Shoshan is no longer CEO, Qlusters CTO whurley went to BMC, Fred Gallagher went to open source database maker Ingres, and former Red Hat sales exec Don Langley has moved on. So I suspect that the mindset and commitment to further the project has departed with them.

The shame is that the openQRM software is good and hopefully openQRM project lead Matt Rechenburg will continue on with the project. openQRM is an excellent tool for someone who wants to provision testing laboratories and with more maturity be able to provide data center automation to the more demanding data centers (a classic rise by disruptive technology as described here). Perchance Qlusters set their sights too high trying to draft the success of a BladeLogic IPO (BladeLogic was since gobbled up by BMC) and they didn’t service a market that VMware has started to abandon as they focus on server consolidation.

With Qlusters turning their attention away perhaps there’s an opportunity for someone to lend their support to Rechenburg’s efforts. Personally, I have been impressed by Enomaly, a Toronto-based virtualization services vendor, that makes Enomalism a management platform for elastic computing. Maybe there is some synergy between the two projects. At one time the openQRM project was very active fronted by my friend and sometime coconspirator whurley who now jets around as BMC’s open source architect (BMC is one of the Big Four). I gave him a call and see if he had any thoughts. Given BMC’s anemic open source offerings I thought maybe he would be stepping up to sponsor the project. Of course now being a corporate guy he just chuckled and gave me the official: “No Comment”. I guess he’s happy to make proprietary software while carrying around an open source title.

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Technorati Tags: Big 4, Bladelogic, BMC, enomalism, Enomaly, Hyperic, Little 3, Little 4, Nagios, Open Source, OpenQRM, Qlusters, RHQ, Sybmiot, Symbiot, Systems Management, webmin, Zenoss

Most of my blogging today will be at the Open Management Consortium website. If you are interested in open source systems management you might want to follow our Twitter feed at:

http://twitter.com/BarcampESM

Attendess are very interesting we had folks from BMC, Tivoli, OpenNMS, Zenoss, Alterpoint, Control Tier from the vendor side.

We also have some heavy users of Enterprise Systems Management from eTrade and Coleman technologies to name a few.

We even have the eloquent and knowledgeable analyst and sandwich connoisseur, Coté of RedMonk.

Technorati Tags: Alterpoint, BarCampESM, OpenNMS, Redmonk, Systems Management, Zenoss

BarCamp Enterprise Systems Management is going on in Austin this weekend if you are interested in systems management please feel free to attend.

J. BLACK’S, Feel Good Lounge
710 W. 6th
Austin, Texas 78701
512.535.8283
www.jblacks.com

Friday Night (01/18/08):

We are planning a kick off party Friday night at J. BLACKS starting around 6pm.  This will be a good time to get to meet, plan, and enjoy.

Saturday (01/19/08)

Thedoors will open at 9am and then go till around 5 or 6pm. Beverages willbe served during the entire time, and we are making arrangements forLunch and Dinner too.

In true Barcamp style most of the sessions will be arranged and scheduled dynamically by the participants.

Technorati Tags: Austin, BarCamp, ESM, Systems Management