Open Source Blog

"We're actively marketing [Bizgres MPP] as an open source solution. That's one of the reasons why we're getting interest. People don't see us as just another data warehousing software firm," Yara told my ComputerWire colleague Madan Shiena last week.

While many companies might still be getting to grips with the open source model, Greenplum has gained traction among Internet firms that already have experience of implementing open source web, application and database servers

"These companies are familiar using open source technologies and have already built entire infrastructures on [open source] building blocks. If you look closely at the genesis of the Internet, it's built mainly on open source standards and LAMP-stacks."

The system is built on commodity (that is, low cost) clusters of servers that extend the capabilities of the PostgreSQL database system. MPP is based on a "shared-nothing" architecture that efficiently breaks up data processing across distributed servers - in effect moving the nodes close to the data to provide high-performance, parallel analysis.

However Yara admitted there are some "conservative sectors" that will not look at open source technology so keenly.

Positioning is also key according to Yara, who said that Greenplum's sweet spot remains the one terabyte-plus market. "Our initial focus is on departmental applications. We're not getting customers to turn off their big enterprise data warehousing system."

"We feel there's still plenty of green field opportunity in this area once you bring the cost of data warehousing down. We'll continue to push in this direction."

Meanwhile, Novell has lifted the eye mask on its involvement in the Bandit open source identity management project. As I previously noted the Bandit project went live recently without any comment from Novell about what it hoped to achieve by sponsoring the common identity framework project.

"We have learned a lot about identity in the enterprise space," Dale Olds, the distinguished engineer at Novell who is heading up the Bandit project, told Timothy Pickett Morgan at ComputerWire.

"The Bandit project is about taking the functions of eDirectory and decomposing them into various pieces and then distributing them across the Internet."

While very proud of the directory services he helped to create, Olds says that the IT industry has to create a system that has multiple identity sources in mind, not a single vendor's identity server.

And Bandit is not just about taking components of eDirectory open source and hoping that Novell will be the main beneficiary of that opening up of the code - although that is a factor in Novell's altruism.

It's about creating a framework that allows different kinds of identity management software to plug into each other and work together. "Everybody recognizes that we need an identity fabric, and we all agree that we need to work together," says Olds.