zenoss

VMware on the cloud and virtualization (Q&A)

VMware has come to define the virtualization market with more than 190,000 customers and dominant market share. But does that success translate to the cloud world?

To better understand how VMware thinks about virtualization and cloud, I talked with Chris Knowles, VMware's enterprise cloud architect, about how the company approaches cloud and what IT feedback the company is getting from customers.

Q: While some organizations have gone all-in on adopting cloud technologies, many organizations are still planning the best approach. How are the companies you are working with looking at implementing public, private, hybrid cloud environments? Knowles: The … Read more

Survey: Virtualization and cloud need management

A new report set to be released this week from open-source systems management provider Zenoss shows that virtualization and cloud computing technologies are set to remain important growth areas in enterprise IT environments.

The overall results of the survey of 204 IT professionals weren't terribly surprising. For example, the report shows that VMware leads the pack with nearly 80 percent of respondents using the VMware hypervisor and that more than 40 percent of the users cite flexibility as the reason for using virtualization.

However, some of the more interesting results include the fact that more than 30 percent of … Read more

Survey: 98 percent of enterprises using open source

Not only is open-source software thriving in systems management but across businesses as a whole, according to a new survey released Tuesday. A nearly 4-year-long survey of open-source systems management usage compiled by open-source software developer Zenoss showed that 98 percent of the respondents said they used open-source software in their enterprises.

These latest statistics, along with survey results from consulting firm Accenture, are further testament to the inevitability of the pervasiveness of open-source software.

What's important to note about the survey results is how both the perception and reality of open-source software has changed--users believe the software is … Read more

Sourceforge eats its open-source dogfood

You might not recognize the name Geeknet, but you probably know its popular tech sites such as Sourceforge, Slashdot, Ohloh, Think Geek, Freshmeat, and the recently acquired Geek.com.

When Geeknet opened a new data center in Chicago two years ago, the network operations team wanted to centralize management of hundreds of systems serving the Geeknet Web network.

Geeknet's servers run 100 percent open-source software, including CentOS Linux, and a number of open-source Web servers, mail servers, databases (MySQL, Postgres, Memchache), along with a large number of source code repositories running Subversion.

The company needed a monitoring and management … Read more

InfoWorld's two minds on open source's value

Each year InfoWorld sets out to rate the "best open source products" with its Bossie awards. Too bad it has decided to cloud the voting with open-source politics, as well.

The politics reveal themselves when InfoWorld tries to settle on a winner between Zenoss and OpenNMS. (Why Hyperic isn't also in that mix, or Reductive Labs' Puppet, I can't fathom, but...)

The editors write (note: the emphasis is mine):

Although Zenoss clearly has the more developed feature set, our Bossie goes to OpenNMS. The reason boils down to business models. OpenNMS is a purely open source … Read more

One Puppet to rule the cloud?

What with all the virtualization hype, one would think that virtual servers had the option of parting the Red Sea or walking on it.

While there's a great deal of promise in virtualization, there's also the peril of managing virtual servers, as Luke Kanies, founder of the Puppet project, points out in a blog post.

You have significant problems when you rely on golden images (i.e., virtual images complete with all necessary services): image sprawl, updating your images, and image state vs. running state...Maintaining these (virtual) images is more like managing a foil ball: it's … Read more

Zenoss aims at small and medium businesses, hits big enterprises

Zenoss recently announced an expansion to its open-source systems and network management product, creating Zenoss Professional Edition to focus on medium-size enterprises. It's a smart move, but in talking with Zenoss CEO Bill Karpovich this past week, Zenoss is actually doing exceptionally well with large enterprises.

Tyco Enterprises, Johns Hopkins, VMware, and others are public references for Zenoss, but these aren't even the ones I find the most interesting. Unfortunately, the others can't publicly be named....

Still, given Zenoss' traction with large companies and its triple-digit percentage revenue growth quarter-over-quarter, it's perhaps not very surprising, therefore, … Read more

Open-source funding day: Greenplum, Alfresco, Zenoss

The venture investments flowed to open-source start-ups today, with new money arriving at Greenplum, Alfresco, and Zenoss.

The biggest chunk, $27 million, went to Greenplum, which develops business intelligence software based on the open-source Bizgres software project; the company's product is designed to help customers sift through data for useful trends. New investors Meritech Capital, Sun Microsystems, and SAP Ventures made the third-round investment, which also drew some from earlier investors.

Greenplum also said it's hired Paul Salazar as vice president of corporate marketing and Joe Otto as vice president of worldwide sales.

Bizgres runs on a single … Read more

New open source venture funding and the importance of SAP Ventures and Intel Capital

I suppose the big news for me today, as an Alfresco employee, should be that we just closed a $9 million Series C round with SAP Ventures leading the round. But since we didn't need the money (not even remotely) and I didn't want the dilution, it's not my favorite news of the day. Let's just say that companies don't always raise money for the money.

I was actually much more intrigued to see Zenoss add $11 million in Series B funding. Or Intel Capital's Series A investment in REvolution Computing, which provides an open-source statistical tool with commercial support and leverages parallelism.

Perhaps the big story out of the Alfresco and REvolution investments is the activity of Intel and SAP in financing open-source companies.… Read more