Cfengine has been around since the early 1990s, and boasts some large customers, including companies such as eBay and Google, and is trying now to capitalize on its customer base by converting users to the pay-version.

Free open source systems management tools typically aren’t as automated or easy to understand as their commercial counterparts, so companies need to have a fairly skilled systems admins on staff to make them work. Also many of the proprietary version of these tools include virtualization-specific features, not included in the free versions.

Open source systems management vendors have a lot of levers they can use to convince a data center manager to buy the proprietary or supported version of their software. But you might not think geography would factor into that decision making process.

That is, unless you’re James Genus, System Administrator at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, located in coastal Maine.

The lab’s primary research focus is on the biological productivity in the world’s oceans and it supports genomic sequencing of single cell organisms, which requires some hefty compute power.

“The amount of data the scientists are producing is staggering,” Genus said. “The systems run almost constantly. As this increases, we need to make sure the environment is as stable as possible.”

Genus has been with the lab nearly a decade, and has used the open source version of CFengine for eight years. “I inherited an array of IT platforms and it was a headache,” Genus said. “If I had not found CFengine, I would not be in IT. I want [the scientists] to be able to come in, sit down and work.”

Bigelow recently moved from the open source version of CFengine to its commercial counterpart, CFengine Nova. And according to Genus, the lab’s location was a big factor in that decision.

Researchers are drawn to remote locations like Maine’s Boothbay Harbor, to get away from society and bureaucracy, to get things done, Genus said. But operating in a very isolated location has its risks. Power can go out for three weeks after an ice storm, and self-sufficiency is important.

“There are not many IT resources in Maine, as there are in New York, Massachusetts or San Francisco. Nobody I’ve talked to in this state is using CFengine,” he said. “It baffled me, even going to Red Hat training sessions in Boston, I’d only met a few people who used it, a few people who understood it. Using CFengine Nova, it’s easier for people to wrap their heads around and put it into action.”

Bigelow is largely a Red Hat Linux shop, and Genus said his team uses some of the free open source tools like Satellite and Spacewalk, “but they weren’t up to par with CFengine,” Genus said. “They don’t do the proactive fixing. We use CFengine to make sure services are up and running, make sure services are configured correctly. If something breaks, they recover automatically.”

Genus said he’s heard about CFengine’s competitors in the open source space, Puppet and Chef, but has not looked at them in detail. He said he’s happy about the tool’s ability to scale well.

Which is a good thing, since the lab’s environment is about to get a lot bigger in the next couple years. Genus said Bigelow has plans to build a new mobile data center pod: 22 racks at 50U each, which once virtualized will scale to 3,000 potential nodes.

Check out our Open Source Systems Management tool slideshow for more info.

• Growth will return to the IT industry in 2010. We predict 3.2% growth for the year, returning the industry to 2008 spending levels of about $1.5 trillion.
• Emerging markets will lead the IT recovery, with BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India China) countries growing 8-13%.
• Cloud computing will expand and mature as we see a strategic battle for cloud platform leadership, new public cloud hot spots, private cloud offerings, cloud appliances, and offerings that bridge public and private clouds.
• Business applications will undergo a fundamental transformation – fusing business applications with social/collaboration software and analytics into a new generation of “socialyptic” apps, challenging current market leaders.
• Rising energy costs and pressure from the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference will make sustainability a source of renewed opportunity for the IT industry in 2010.
• Other industries will come out of the recession with a transformation agenda and look to IT as an increasingly important lever for these initiatives. Smart meters and electronic medical records will hit important adoption levels.

OmniTI manages 15 data centers with heterogeneous architectures for multiple clients, and Schlossnagle said he’s used every tool under the sun: Zenoss, Tivoli, OpenView, Nagios, Cacti and more.

The recurring problems Schlossnagle found with open source management tools — scaling issues, repeated effort for configuration management, and requirements for powerful server infrastructure – frustrated his team to the point where OmniTI built its own toolset for monitoring metrics, graphing data for capacity planning, and post-mortem analysis of problems.

The tool uses an agent-based system. Users would install a Noit Daemon in each important portion of infrastructure and configure it to monitor different services. The software is written in C, plug-ins are written in C or Lua. Reconnoiter uses SNMP, ITMP, HTTP among other protocols.

The company is offering it under BSD license on its Website for free.

According to Schlossnagle, challenges using the open source management software Nagios were a major driver for developing the Reconnoiter tool.

“Nagios is quite inefficient in the way it collects data,” Schlossnagle said. “It follows the age-old Unix philosophy that you use the right tool for each job. This means that Nagios ends up launching thousands of small applications to test things. While the lots of little tools philosophy is often convenient, it heavily conflicts with high performance, low latency requirements. Often purpose built tools need to take over in that role — that is what Reconnoiter is.

“I have to buy a big, expensive box to run Nagios — I don’t with the Reconnoiter agents,” Schlossnagle continued. “Nagios does fault detection, but not trending — which means I have to double my efforts by configuring both Nagios and another tool.”

Schlossnagle also said Nagios’ monitoring was centralized, so it was difficult to adding checks in the field. Managing configurations was hard to track as you deployed new services and machines.

The Reconnoiter tool polls systems to see if they’re healthy in a similar way that Nagios does, but of the open source-commercial hybrid products that are out there, Schlossnagle said the product is most similar to Hyperic.

“Hyperic takes a more holistic view of monitoring in that it includes both trending and fault detection. Reconnoiter takes this approach as well.”

The Reconnoiter tool is also designed to help IT managers analyze Web traffic events in a very granular way, even ones that happened in the distant past. “RRDTool is specifically designed to retain data within size constraints. You define how long you wish to retain data on various granularities,” Schlossnagle said. “In most systems that use rrdtool (like Cacti) recent data (like one week) is retained on five minute granularity, while data older than a week is reduced to a granularity of one hour. So, if you want to compare a spike today to one from six months ago, it is very likely that you have a defeating skew: 288 five-minute intervals for “today” and four six-hour intervals for the day in question six months back.”

Reconnoiter approaches this by taking the stance that storage is cheap. “There is not excuse for throwing any of that data away. I’ll go buy a terabyte of disk. I’m not going to search back 12 months very often, so it doesn’t need to be fast, but I need to be able to do it.”

According to Schlossnagle, watching the spike happen gives you a better understanding how traffic patterns shift during a major event, for example a Web site being picked up by a large social media site like Digg.

“If I’m looking at that spike on my systems at thirty second granularity, I can tell you how fast that spike happened. If I use the RRD tool with Nagios and Cacti, I can only see that day at that level of granularity for about six hours.”

This tool can help IT managers plan for capacity during spike scenarios and compare to events in the past.

“Our primary goal was to make our lives easier. This tool replaces an enormous amount of headache at OmniTI,” Schlossnagle said. “Making it a successful open source tool makes it even easier. One of the short term goals it to have it adopted other places and get the tool deployed in large environments.”

Today, OmniTI is slowly introducing Reconnoiter to its managed services clients. The company is currently monitoring tens of thousands of metrics across five data centers, approaching a terabyte of metric data.

OmniTI does not plan to develop a commercial version at this time, like Hyperic or Zenoss. “An open source approach with a strong community is better,” Schlossnagle said. “I don’t want to be in the tools business. If a company wants to give us money for support and indemnify them with IP rights, we won’t turn away that money.

“The key difference being the product we deliver, support and indemnify, would be the same product, not the one that has special neat features that paying customers get.”

You can give Reconnoiter a test run at labs.omniti.com.

“Zenoss and Hyperic beachfront with open source too much and it keeps them out of the enterprise,” Willis said. “Stop it with the open source stuff. Stop even mentioning it. Solar Winds is kicking your butt all over the place and all they’re talking about is price and performance.”

Willis isn’t advocating that Zenoss and Hyperic drop open source altogether, rather make it a line item instead of a headline.

“Almost everybody I talk to in enterprise IT management isn’t keen on open source,” Willis said. “If there’s a team that wants to run Nagios, then they usually can get a checkmark on it if they don’t have anything already in place. But if you want to rip and replace Tivoli with Zenoss, management will say ‘Eh…. I’m not sure about that.’”

If a company is going the Nagios, Zenoss or Hyperic route, they’re going hook line and sinker, according to Solar Winds senior VP Kenny Van Zant. “They’ll suffer the manual cost of configuration and maintenance that open source will bring, because they don’t even have $5000 to spend,” Van Zant said. “Or people are open source fans who want to use open source wherever they can. When there is a gap on Zenoss, the fill it with nTop, Cacti, or some other open source product of the month and integrate them all together.

“We bump up against those free tools when the open source person leaves the company,” Van Zant said. “We replace Nagios deployments. It just takes too much to keep it up and running.”

Are you willing to bring open source systems management tools into your shop? Did your management team object? Email me or leave feedback in the comments.

“When people move their storage and server arrays from location A to B, these systems are loaded with sensitive customer data, and if one asset falls of the truck, they would be out millions of dollars in data and in a lot of trouble,” Dennedy said. “Also, when someone comes in to repair systems they have access to all of the data on those systems,” so erasing the data is a smart move. 

For example, I recently read this article about a private contractor who downloaded sensitive data from a U.K. government system onto a memory stick, and then lost it. And another story, also from the U.K, reported that a computer disc containing the medical records of more than 38,000 National Health Service patients went missing when it was sent to a software company to be backed up, ironically, in case the records got lost.

While Sun didn’t divulge the specific customers or incidents that inspired this new service, I imagine they where similar to those reported above. Dennedy said Sun’s new data erasure service was created to prevent vulnerabilities when repairs are being done by a third  party or when systems are being re-deployed to a new site. “You should know that if you lose a piece of equipment, you are losing only that silicon and not the data that was on it,” Dennedy said.

Another time to erase data is when a system is decommissioned and disposed of; many companies don’t think about erasing the data before ditching the old hardware, and that data could end up in the wrong hands, according to Dennedy. “It isn’t that they don’t care, but there is some ignorance about the massive amounts of data contained by the people getting rid of the equipment,” she said.

“Our technicians will administer software based erasure service for storage and servers, and will hand over a certificate to say, this is no longer an information asset,” she said. Sun is offering the service to non-Sun servers and storage as well.

Of course, users can erase data in their own systems using hard drive erasing software (a simple Google search yields over 480,000 results) and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other companies offering this service, along with a certification, as well.

It is unfortunate that we live in a time when there are so many criminals waiting in the wings to steal data; the market for stolen data is about $276 million, according to Symantec Corp. Knowing this, taking every precaution to secure customer data with services like those from Sun and other companies is very necessary today.

As a reporter, I am keenly aware that when it comes to spinning crap into silk, product vendors are pros. So I was pretty skeptical when I saw the title of his paper.

So I asked Gardos to explain why in the world data center managers should thank anyone for the economic cesspool in which they now exist.

For starters, companies have had to reduce their head count because of the economy, so they have half the IT staff to do the same amount of work, he said.

And this is good?

Well, no, but data centers can’t have servers failing left and right and unorganized systems when there are fewer people to manage the issues. “This meltdown has accelerated the path to something dramatically more efficient,” Gardos said. “People are coming up with a new paradigm and are finding ways to improve their systems, because they have to. People are looking at how to minimize costs and how to cut down on tasks that don’t add value to the organization.”

Now that it is time to tighten ship, Gardos said data centers are doing things that will result in long-term benefits:

1.  Reducing costs, energy consumption and waste. Businesses have to find ways to minimize energy costs in the data center, reduce overspending on compliance efforts and automate time-consuming tasks.

2. Core data center priorities. IT professionals have seen the true centrality of product and project performance to company competitiveness. The downturn is to thank for the newfound clarity and redefined priorities.

3. Frugality. Businesses are forced to check line items and cut frivolous spending. This nuisance is a blessing in disguise and will improve spending for years to come.
4. Innovation. IT decision makers and managers have put their heads together to improve efficiency, productivity and competitiveness. This trial-by-fire brainstorming cbreathe new life into companies.

5. Cultivating talent. This includes talent. There is a surplus of once untouchable and highly qualified IT professionals swimming around. IT managers can beef up their staff for less.

6. Green IT. Ideas for operational savings have actually provoked businesses to engage in greening techniques. Many companies will emerge with lowered costs and a greener data center.

7. Competitiveness. Businesses are learning to do more with less, and those habits will continue after the crisis and improve competitiveness in times of prosperity.

8. Long-term benefits. Things are tight now but will the downturn actually spur budget increases in the post-short term for projects that have been placed on the backburner? Lessons learned may actually induce additional spending on virtualization, automation and other cost-savings initiatives.

Of course, it should be noted here that GridApp provides data center automation equipment and would probably love to see data centers using its tools, but Gardos made an effort to remain vendor neutral during our discussion.

“It is clear that infrastructure management and automation will drive efficiency forward – -things like [IT automation software company] BladeLogic make a lot of sense when there are fewer employees to do the work,” Gardos said. “Companies have to change their processes to do more with fewer people, and get more value out of the people the company has.”

He made some good points , and I wonder how many companies now lay off employees only to find themselves buying expensive software to automate the tasks their staff once performed. Seems likely that the data center automation market could ultimately benefit from these hard economic times.

The keynote addresses on both days of the conference, October 24 & 24, covered data center efficiency at length, with plenty of tips and resources to help data centers cut back on power consumption, though it appears that not many people are taking the necessary measures to reduce consumption. Because of this, government plans to step in and mandate power saving measures to prevent future climate change.

As awful as this sounds, government intervention is a necessary measure at this point, because facility spending has increased tremendously over the past two years with no end in sight, and with all of this additional compute capacity, the outlook for the environment is grim.

The energy required to power and cool a single server emits four tons of greenhouse gases, so by 2012, data centers worldwide will exceed greenhouse gas emissions of the airline industry, according to Ken Brill, President and Executive Director for the Uptime Institute, who gave a keynote address called “Revolutionizing Data Center Efficiency” on October 24 based on the McKinsey / Uptime Institute report.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/75JJ43q2RUE " width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

So, why has data center power consumption spun out of control? In addition to the increasing demands from Web 2.0, 80% of today’s compute demand is performed on distributed systems with only 5% to 20% utilization rates, whereas before 1980, mainframes were used, and at much higher utilization rates, Brill said.

The way to reverse the trend sounds easy enough; use virtualization to consolidate systems and increase server utilization rates, and also kill comatose servers.

Simple as these steps sound, it can be difficult to do when you don’t keep track of servers to know their utilization rates, Brill said. In this case, implementing a formal de-commissioning program using ITIL to document, bill back and audit the systems is a first step.  [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/RGs-2uzKi7U" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

“If we want to become energy efficient we have to become better engineers,” Brill said.

Other measures that can make a major impact are correctly setting the cooling unit set point, shutting off humidification and de-humidification functions, implementing hot aisle/cold aisle containment, turning off unneeded cooling units, and if possible, increasing eco-friendly water side cooling, Brill said.

Data centers that are adding hardware should make an effort to buy efficient power supplies and hardware, which all the major vendors offer, and rightsize memory to avoid using excess power, Brill said

If your asking yourself who in IT has enough extra time to do all of these things, Brill had a suggestion for that, too; appoint an “Energy Czar” – someone who cares about the environment and wasting power – to make sure the data center facilities and operations are as efficient as possible.

Of course, the Energy Czar could also get a bonus here and there for lowering the company power bills, which most certainly will happen when even some of the above measures are implemented.

Companies can also use efficiency software tools or hire outside consultants to help increase energy efficiency, and there are plenty of choices today.

Some of the technologies listed were the obvious, like virtualization and cloud computing, and Gartner predicts that servers will evolve beyond the blade server stage that exists today.

Gartner’s definition of a strategic technology is one that could have a significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. The analysts looked at factors like high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major financial investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.

These technologies impact the organization’s long-term plans, programs and initiatives. They may be strategic because they have matured to broad market use or because they enable strategic advantage from early adoption.

Gartner’s the top 10 strategic technologies for 2009 include:

Virtualization. In addition to server virtualization, virtualization in storage and client devices is also moving rapidly as a way to eliminate duplicate copies of data on the real storage devices while maintaining the illusion to the accessing systems that the files are as originally stored (data deduplication). This can significantly decrease the cost of storage devices and media to hold information.

Hosted virtual images deliver a near-identical result to blade-based PCs. But, instead of the motherboard function being located in the data center as hardware, it is located there as a virtual machine bubble. However, despite ambitious deployment plans from many organizations, deployments of hosted virtual desktop capabilities will be adopted by fewer than 40 percent of target users by 2010.

Cloud Computing. Cloud computing providers deliver computing capabilities “as a service” to external companies and the services are delivered in a highly scalable and elastic fashion using Internet technologies and techniques.

Although cost is a potential benefit for small companies, the biggest benefits are the built-in elasticity and scalability, which not only reduce barriers to entry, but also enable these companies to grow quickly. As certain IT functions are industrializing and becoming less customized, there are more possibilities for larger organizations to benefit from cloud computing.

Servers — Beyond Blades. Servers are evolving beyond the blade server stage that exists today. This evolution will simplify the provisioning of capacity to meet growing needs.

The organization tracks the various resource types, for example, memory, separately and replenishes only the type that is needed, so companies don’t have to pay for all resource types to upgrade capacity. It also simplifies the inventory of systems, eliminating the need to track and purchase various sizes and configurations. The result will be higher utilization because of lessened “waste” of resources that are in the wrong configuration or that come along with the needed processors and memory in a fixed bundle.

Web-Oriented Architectures. The Internet is arguably the best example of an agile, interoperable and scalable service-oriented environment in existence. This level of flexibility is achieved because of key design principles inherent in the Internet/Web approach, as well as the emergence of Web-centric technologies and standards that promote these principles.

The use of Web-centric models to build global-class solutions cannot address the full breadth of enterprise computing needs. However, Gartner expects that continued evolution of the Web-centric approach will enable its use in an ever-broadening set of enterprise solutions during the next five years.

Enterprise Mashups.Enterprises are now investigating taking mashups from cool Web hobby to enterprise-class systems to augment their models for delivering and managing applications.

Through 2010, the enterprise mashup product environment will experience significant flux and consolidation, and application architects and IT leaders should investigate this growing space for the significant and transformational potential it may offer their enterprises.

Specialized Systems. Appliances have been used to accomplish IT purposes, but only with a few classes of function have appliances prevailed. Heterogeneous systems are an emerging trend in high-performance computing to address the requirements of the most demanding workloads, and this approach will eventually reach the general-purpose computing market. Heterogeneous systems are also specialized systems with the same single-purpose imitations of appliances, but the heterogeneous system is a server system into which the owner installs software to accomplish its function.

Social Software and Social Networking. Social software includes a broad range of technologies, such as social networking (Facebook), social collaboration, social media and social validation. Organizations should consider adding a social dimension to a conventional Web site or application and should adopt a social platform sooner, rather than later, because the greatest risk lies in failure to engage and thereby, being left mute in a dialogue where your voice must be heard.

Unified Communications. During the next five years, the number of different communications vendors with which a typical organization works with will be reduced by at least 50 percent due to increases in the capability of application servers and the general shift of communications applications to common off-the-shelf server and operating systems. As this occurs, formerly distinct markets, each with distinct vendors, converge, resulting in massive consolidation in the communications industry.

Organizations must build careful, detailed plans for when each category of communications function is replaced or converged, coupling this step with the prior completion of appropriate administrative team convergence.

Business Intelligence. Business Intelligence (BI), the top technology priority in Gartner’s 2008 CIO survey, can have a direct positive impact on a company’s business performance. BI is directed toward business managers and workers who are tasked with running, growing and transforming the business. Tools that let these users make faster, better and more-informed decisions are particularly valuable in a difficult business environment.

Green IT. Shifting to more efficient products and approaches can allow for more equipment to fit within an energy footprint. Regulations are multiplying and have the potential to seriously constrain companies in building data centers, as the effect of power grids, carbon emissions from increased use and other environmental impacts are under scrutiny. Organizations should consider regulations and have alternative plans for data center and capacity growth.

A few of these technologies were also on Gartner’s list for 2008, including Green IT, Unified Communications, WOA, Mashup and Social Software. Other technologies Gartner expected to be significant for businesses in 2008 were Business Process Modeling, Metadata Management, Virtualization 2.0, Computing Fabric, and Real World Web.

Unisys’ new ES7000 Model 7600R Enterprise Server is based on the new six-core Intel Xeon processor 7400 series. It has 16 sockets providing up to 96 processor cores. According to Unisys, the 7600R is designed for database and online transaction processing environments, large-scale consolidation and virtualization initiatives and business intelligence deployments with Microsoft SQL Server.

Model 7600R can support consolidation of 64 SQL Server databases into a single four-socket, six-core Xeon processor configuration – with 24 total processor cores – which Unisys claims is better than a commodity server farm of 64 dual-socket, single-core Xeon processor servers with 128 total processor cores, while using less disk and providing better response times.

The new server also supports VMware ESX Server and Microsoft Hyper-V, and supports dynamic partitioning so users can add more processor, memory and I/O resources on the fly without disrupting system operations. Unisys plans to introduce secure partitioning in the first half of 2009, which provides partitioning capabilities at the processor core level.

Prices for the ES7000 Model 7600R range from $26,430 to $135,000. Unisys will exhibit the ES7000 Model 7600R at VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas, Sept. 15-18.

Unisys business services
Unisys also announced new Business Assurance Services that help companies evaluate the cost and benefits of disaster recovery products, reduce the time it takes to deploy the best ones and reduce operational costs by improving resource utilization.

“We are vendor-agnostic and will implement whichever technology is best for the client. It could be a Unisys product, or it could be from another vendor,” said Jody Little, vice president of solutions and services at Unisys.

The Unisys Business Assurance Services, using discovery processes and tools developed with support from Unisys partner GlassHouse Technologies, include the following:

• Unisys Disaster Recovery Architecture Service, which provides a methodology to build application and data disaster recovery capabilities.
• Unisys Backup Modernization Service, which helps clients select new technologies and services to support backup environments at both core and remote sites.
• Unisys Data Protection for Backup Service, which helps clients improve backup and restore operations for business information, reducing costs by improving utilization of assets. Unisys experts also make vendor-independent recommendations and create a prioritized action plan

Unisys has also added new management software components to its Infrastructure Management Suite, which automates and orchestrates management of a real-time IT infrastructure. More information can be found on the Unisys website.

An official audit of the actual number of attendees won’t be available until October 2008, but I doubt there were that many people there, and I’m not the only one. The buzz at the show this year was that there were far fewer attendees than in previous years. I also attended the VMworld 2007 show at the Moscone Center last September, and know what 10,000 people looks like at Moscone. This crowd was much thinner.

Not that having fewer than 10,000 attendees is a bad thing; some say it signals true success for Linux; the buzz about the operating system has fizzled out because it is mainstream. That might be, but I think our toilet of an economy might also be at play in potentially lower attendance.

As for the program, there were 200 combined educational sessions, tutorials and hands-on-labs among 17 tracks, including applications, mobile Linux, virtualization and advanced facilities management in the data center. We covered a handful of them, which can be found on our LinuxWorld/ NGDC roundup site.

The themes throughout the show were mobile Linux, power consumption and green technologies, and virtualization. Keynote presentations from executives at Merrill Lynch, McKesson, Cisco Systems Inc., IBM, Citrix Systems Inc. and Lucasfilm Ltd., explored many of these themes.

On the exhibit show floor were companies including Astaro Corp., Barracuda Networks, Copan Systems, Opengear, Canonical, Access, Oracle Corp., DataSynapse, Cisco, Fujitsu, Intel, Talend, Brocade, Ubucon, Bivio Networks, VMware, SugarCRM, Rackable Systems, Wind River and Dice.

New features included the Mobile Linux Conference, Software Central, Installfest for Schools, an open source voting demonstration, and the Golden Penguin Bowl.

The Golden Penguin Bowl was a contest between three geeks from Novell and SUSE against three nerds from Ubuntu who battled over who can answer the most obscure trivia regarding sci-fi, high-tech, Linux and all things geek.

The LinuxWorld.com Product Excellence Awards were announced on Tuesday, Aug. 5, and a complete list of winners can be found on the LinuxWorld and the Next Generation Data Center Conference sites.

All the keynote addresses from LinuxWorld and NGDC can be downloaded from the LinuxWorld website or the NGDC website.

Next year’s LinuxWorld Conference & Expo and Next Generation Data Center Conference & Expo are scheduled to take place Aug. 10-13, 2009, at the Moscone Center.