Open Source Weblog

The Open Management Consortium has been founded to create more awareness of open source software for systems management, create standards that enable interoperability and integration, and work together on common projects.

The OMC brings together data centre management software from Qlusters, configuration management software from Emu, infrastructure monitoring from Zenoss, the Webmin systems administration interface, the openSIMS security infrastructure management software supported by Symbiot, and the Nagios service and network monitoring expertise of Ayamon, the consultancy firm set up by Nagios founder, Ethan Galstad.

“We can all work together, not just on the technology, but also on the sales, marking and overall evangelism of open source systems management,” Qlusters chief technology officer and OMC co-founder, William Hurley, told me.

As I recently noted the great thing about all these projects, as they mature, is how they can all come together to create a large, enterprise-scale systems and network management solution, and through integration that they can present a combined whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

“We’ve got more projects involved that we’ll announce later, but we’re starting with six and we want to address the number one problem that people in data centres are facing, and that is choice,” added Hurley. “We take a view of abundance. By working together, we’ll increase the opportunities for all of our projects.”

Hurley and Mark Hinkle, Emu VP of strategy and OMC co-founder, explained that the goal of the OMC is not to create a single open source systems management framework to compete with the likes of CA, BMC, IBM Tivoli, or Hewlett Packard OpenView, and maintained that an aim is to improve interoperability with those vendors’ products.

“This is not an affront to the proprietary members, we’re helping open source get organized,” said Hurley. “We invite them to use the fruits of our labour, and we also invite advice and guidance. We don’t want to reinvent the wheel.”

On the OMC’s blog, Hinkle expanded on his view of how the project will evolve. “When I was a kid I loved Legos. They allowed me to snap together almost any variety of toy I chose. That was the appeal, I got what I wanted the way I wanted it,” he writes. “Many years later I have grown up and use a different kind of building blocks, those of the open source software variety.

“I want to take the Lego approach for systems management. Snapping together pieces to create a management console that best suites my needs rather than being roped into one product family or one vendor’s vision of management.”

Another goal for the OMC is to open up the process for standards development, which remains closed to smaller vendors, users and individual developers, according to Hurley. “The way we drive these things is broken and we need to fix it. The role we have is to open source the development of that,” he said.

“We share the goal of user-driven innovation. Open standards to date have not been influenced by the people who use them. We want all the discussions around activities to happen out in the open and the price to participate is your participation.”

For the first six months, however, the goal is very much one off increasing awareness of open source systems management software, however. “Linux has crossed the chasm but open source has not, so acceptance and awareness and perception in the market is the number one goal for the first six months,” explained Hurley.