When Sam Lamonica first joined Rudolph and Sletten as CIO in 2003, one of his first orders of business was to stabilize the IT infrastructure at the construction firm. “There were all sorts of IS problems affecting the network and the applications,” Lamonica recalled. And with no uniform systems management tools in place, the IT group was essentially flying blind. “We knew we had a problem when one of two things happened,” Lamonica said. “We’d get calls from end users telling us an application was down, or we’d look at the servers and see that the lights were not blinking.”

A 600-employee commercial construction firm with four offices in California, Rudolph and Sletten relies heavily on its IT infrastructure to conduct business. At any given time, the company operates 50 or 60 construction projects at job sites that last anywhere from one to five years; each job site essentially operates as a temporary regional office that requires all the connectivity and applications as a permanent office. So keeping tabs on applications and the network from the company’s data center in Redwood City, Calif., is critical to keeping remote operations running smoothly.

In a previous job, Lamonica got to know Bob Fanini and Dave Lilly, the two entrepreneurs who went on to start GroundWork Open Source Inc., a provider of open source IT and network monitoring software. “The previous company I worked for – Phoenix Technologies – was actually GroundWork’s first customer,” Lamonica said.

In addition to GroundWork, Lamonica was also familiar with HP OpenView, another monitoring and systems management tool. “We really needed something we could implement quickly, so we went with GroundWork,” Lamonica says.

Within six weeks, Rudolph and Sletten had its first set of diagnostics and assessments, courtesy of the GroundWork Monitor Professional tool. Today Lamonica uses the tool to monitor the entire infrastructure, from enterprise business applications and email to servers and network devices. Reliability and stability have improved markedly, from about 80% when Lamonica arrived to 99.99%.

Gone are the days when IT was the last to know when a problem occurred. “We set thresholds, so that we know well before issues arise,” Lamonica said.

Lamonica said that GroundWork has changed some minds regarding the use of open source at the primarily Windows-based Rudolph and Sletten. “We don’t really care if something is open source anymore,” he said. “We just want a solution that fits our needs.”

Working with vendors is tough. You need their help, they want your money. Hopefully, whatever it is they help you install works and the price meets you both somewhere in the middle (as in your side of the middle, right?).

Sometimes this process is a headache, but sometimes a project can really surprise you—things just work and upper management is just peachy keen with how the whole thing looks on the balance sheet.

In that vein, SearchEnterpriseLinux.com wants to help its readers discover the best of the best in Linux products for the enterprise in our prestigious SearchEnterpriseLinux.com 2007 Products of the Year awards. We’ve been asking readers and vendors over at SearchEnterpriseLinux.com to nominate a favorite product they’ve used or to nominate their own new product, and now we’ve opened it up to the Intertubes here at the Enterprise Linux Log. Regardless of where you fall — vendor, user or general Linux guru –the deadline is drawing near!

Our editorial team and a select panel of industry experts and analysts are currently accepting submissions online until 5 p.m. PST on Nov. 9, 2007 in a range of categories, including: Server Linux platform product (either a distribution release or a new, integrated server Linux offering); Security applications/tools for Linux on the server; Virtualization product for Linux on the server; and Linux administration tools. You can access the 2007 POY submission page in the link above.

To qualify, new or significantly upgraded products must have been shipped after October 31, 2006, and before November 1, 2007. Submit your entry today and let us know what you think are the top data center products on the market!

Yesterday, Red Hat offered a smörgåsbord to the press and the analyst community. Their main announcement: Red Hat is the greatest Linux and open source vendor on the face of the planet.

Actually, there were several announcements in yesterday’s conference call and webcast: within the typical sales and marketing noise was talk of virtualization at almost every level of the discussion, hosted by a trio of Red Hat executives.

The first of the announcements, regarding the official release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, was made by Scott Crenshaw, Red Hat’s vice president of enterprise Linux business. In some prepared remarks, Crenshaw went after proprietary virtualization technologies, saying RHEL 5.1’s virtualization delivers broader server support and up to twice the performance that the competition.

The skinny on 5.1

There were no real surprises in this announcement, especially if you’re a regular reader of SearchEnterpriseLinux.com. Back in September we filed a preview article on 5.1 (RHEL 5.1 update tweaks virtualization, Windows interoperability), where we discussed the virtualizaiton updates with a few experts. Jan Stafford, our Senior Site Editor at SEL, had a 5.1 preview up as far back as May from the Red Hat Summit.

RHEL 5.0 was a success when it launched in March. The inclusion of Xen support was almost a full year behind Novell, which had baked in Xen paravirtualization back in June 2006, but it worked as advertised, albeit with a few tweaks here and there. “It’s not half-baked,” Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff told me at the time, “but it certainly doesn’t have the fit and finish we see with VMware.” Not many things do these days, as VMware loves to point out during their quarterly “ESX Server prints money!!!” press conferences. With 5.1 officially avaialble to Red Hat customers via the Red Hat Network, however, the consensus was that the gap got a little smaller.

Also back in September, Jim Klein, director of information services and technology at the Saugus Union School District in Saugus, Calif., told me that RHEL 5.1 is a “significant improvement over version 5 on the management side of things.”

In this regard, the Windows functionality in 5.1 is critical: IT managers are making decisions now about which platform to base their virtualized infrastructure on, Klein said. “If Red Hat can get their Windows drivers out soon, I think they will be well positioned to pick up significant market share in the coming year,” he said (Read Jim Klein’s Enterprise Linux Log guest blog post on Xen and Fedora 7 – J.L.).

Chance of clouds

Moving on, things got a bit cloudy during the press conference as Crenshaw and company (Paul Cormier, v.p engineering; and Brian Stevens, CTO) announced that beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a web service that provides re-sizeable compute capacity in the cloud.

In a statement that accompanied the press call, Red Hat said the combination of RHEL and Amazon EC2 “changes the economics of computing by allowing customers to pay only for the infrastructure software services and capacity that they actually use. Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2 enables customers to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, removing the need to over-buy software and hardware capacity as a set of resources to handle periodic spikes in demand.”

As part of this partnership, Red Hat Network will offer a common set of management and automation tools across on-premises deployments and the Amazon EC2 cloud computing environment. Red Hat will provide technical support and maintenance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2. This is the first commercially supported operating system available on Amazon EC2.

As far as pricing and availability are concerned, RHEL on Amazon EC2 is available as a private beta today, with public beta availability planned for the fourth calendar quarter of 2007. Base prices are $19 per month, per user and $0.21, $0.53 or $0.94 for every compute hour used on Amazon’s EC2 service, depending on whether customers choose a small, large or extra-large compute instance size, plus bandwidth and storage fees.

Red Hat Appliance OS, HO!

The final piece of the pie was the pending release of Red Hat Appliance Operating System, or AOS for short. This ISV-themed OS means that in the very near future (first half of 2008, execs told me), ISVs will be assembling appliances for their customers that run on AOS and work with every certified RHEL application under the sun. Hint: That’s a lot, and was exactly the angle Red Hat executives took on the Wednesday call.

“The Red Hat Appliance Operating System will allow applications that are certified on Red Hat Enterprise Linux to be deployed as software appliances on the broadest range of servers in the industry, including those running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, VMware ESX and Microsoft Windows Viridian. Red Hat’s Linux Automation strategy, also announced today, delivers a standardized development, deployment and management infrastructure for the entire Red Hat Enterprise Linux ecosystem,” a statement said. Look for an industry reaction piece from us on SearchEnterpriseLinux.com later in the day.

The Red Hat Appliance Operating System (AOS) is built from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with which it shares full ABI and API compatibility. It includes the Virtual Appliance Development Kit (vADK) that will allow ISVs to configure the operating system along with their middleware and applications to produce a complete system image.

Red Hat also announced that a range of software solutions on Red Hat Exchange are available for trial and purchase as pre-configured software appliances. Customers can now purchase and deploy an integrated solution consisting of third-party software, JBoss middleware and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The total time necessary to purchase, install and use these solutions is “just minutes,” Crenshaw said.

A lot of PR in this announcement, so we’ll have to see where it goes in 2008. Stay tuned.

Here are 10 best practices for system monitoring that Javier Soltero, CTO of Hyperic Inc., has seen succeed in his years in IT.

1. Define what it means for a given resource — a server, an application or a service — to be labeled “production”.
2. Figure out what monitoring you need to satisfy the production requirement.
3. Implement the monitoring capability, either manually or with open source tools like Nagios or commercial tools.
4. Define what it means for something to be “broken/unavailable/on fire” — also referred to as WARN/ERROR/CRITICAL.
5. Implement alerts in your monitoring system to capture these thresholds.
6. Define what process is to be followed for each alarm level.
7. Make sure your alerting process follows that notification process.
8. Create roles/responsibilities for groups of people to share alerts, control and detailed access to relevant their job function.Focusing individuals generally means better performance for their area.
9. Designate a small number of super-users that architect your entire system of alerts, monitoring protocols, roles, etc., to ensure they follow a single blueprint.
10. Lather, rinse, and repeat if necessary.

I pulled these tips from a LinuxWorld 2007 preview interview with Javier Soltero. In another excerpt from that interview — Virtualization boosts Linux adoption big-time — he talks about the synergy between Linux and virtualization and challenges posed in managing multiple-operating system environments and identifying and tracking virtual machines. Javier also offered some great comments on other subjects, which can be found in articles from our LinuxWorld and Next Generation Data Center Conference 2007 coverage here.

We’re working on another series at SearchEnterpriseLinux.com: application servers!

We want to know what’s new, what people are using, and why. We want to get the bottom of how things have changed over the past few years because, basically, a few years in technology is like 10 years to everyone else.

To get things started I had a few conversations with Robert Frances Group analyst Michael Dortch. In 2005, Dortch and the RFG put together a report on Linux application server TCO vs. Windows and Solaris. Linux won prettily handily in that report, but how have things fared over the past two years?

Regarding Linux application servers, Dortch told me the primary “heat” right now seems to be between Red Hat’s JBoss and IBM’s WebSphere Application Server Community Edition (WAS-CE). WAS_CE is basically a streamlined iteration of The Apache Software Foundation’s Geronimo. According to IBM (grain of salt alert), combined downloads of Geronimo and WAS-CE have been outpacing those of JBoss. We’re going to dig into that a bit with some original content later on this month.

“Also, WAS-CE is already certified for Java Enterprise Edition version 5, something I don’t think JBoss has achieved yet,” Dortch said. “JBoss will get there, of course, if it hasn’t already. However, I wonder if JBoss is still too busy integrating itself with Red Hat to devote most of its resources to development and support, where they belong.”

Regarding application server TCO, Dortch said that with enterprise-class application server software (and beefed-up versions of Linux and OpenSolaris) available for free download, “TCO” stands less for “total cost of ownership” and more for “take costs out.” However, to have a “totally compatible organization” often requires enterprise-class service and support, he said, and perhaps integration and interoperability assistance.

Even with the support hurdles however, Dortch said that the Linux route still ends up saving IT managers money in the long run. “These can cost money, but the overall costs can still be significantly below those of traditionally licensed software, especially running on non-commodity hardware. So from this perspective, the recommendations RFG made in 2005 remain valid, although choices have expanded and evolved dramatically,” he said.

Dortch’s advice to IT managers:

1. Enterprise IT decision-makers therefore have to expand and evolve their focus, and that of their business colleagues, beyond dollars-and-cents views of TCO.
2. These expanded views are going to have to include elements ranging from the availability, cost, and quality of service and support to “time to success” with new applications, servers, and services.
3. Open source community involvement: Other important factors in many cases include the accessibility, relevance, and responsiveness of — and enterprise willingness to participate in — the developer and user communities surrounding chosen and candidate solutions. A growing number of enterprises are finding that participation and support of these communities generates direct and significant benefit to their enterprises.

But enough about that. What are you using today? Why?

Drop me a comment or send an email to me at Jack Loftus, News Writer.

Today, Red Hat announced the immediate availability of an updated Red Hat Command Center service. The service, available since 2003, is marketed at small and medium-sized business that want makes enterprise-class monitoring technology at a reduced cost.

According to a release from Red Hat, the Command Center update extends Red Hat’s portfolio of systems management capabilities offered under both on-premises and software as a service (SaaS) delivery models.

Red Hat Command Center delivers monitoring for a wide range of IT infrastructure components spanning from servers and network devices to business applications and web sites. Customers can monitor both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss instances; as well as web servers like Apache and Tomcat; databases like Oracle and MySQL; and network services (DNS, FTP, SNMP). With the update, Command Center will now provide unlimited basic up/down monitoring for all systems in a customer’s network, with one paid Command Center subscription.

Red Hat executives said in a statement that Command Center can complement Red Hat’s other SaaS management services, delivered using Red Hat Network Hosted or Red Hat Network Satellite and the JBoss Operations Network.

The primary system management SaaS solution is Red Hat Network Hosted, providing software updates, management and provisioning without the need for additional customer-deployed infrastructure. Customers can keep machines current with the latest security fixes and patches for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Directory Server, Application Stack and now any ISV application delivered through Red Hat Exchange (RHX). Red Hat Network Hosted is included with every Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription. Red Hat Command Center extends these capabilities to include extensive online monitoring, alerting and escalation capabilities.

The primary system management on-premises applications are Red Hat Network Satellite and JBoss Operations Network. These are designed for larger environments. Red Hat Network Satellite provides software updates, configuration management, bare-metal provisioning, system monitoring and virtualization management for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It is ideal for larger configurations, scaling from a few dozen to thousands of servers. JBoss Operations Network provides a cross-operating systems management platform for the JBoss Application Platform. Deployed in a server-agent architecture it provides inventory, administration, configuration, deployment and advanced monitoring for components which comprise middleware applications.

Red Hat Command Center is available in North America today, with worldwide availability expected later this year.

Red Hat made a play into the data management space today with the acquisition of Waltham, Mass.-based MetaMatrix.

On Tuesday, Red Hat senior vice president of enterprise solutions Tim Yeaton was on hand during a conference call with reporters and investors to detail what the move meant for his company and for customers looking to Red Hat for their data management needs.

Some of the specifics, from a press release issued by Red Hat to coincide with Yeaton’s conference call:

Red Hat has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the business of MetaMatrix, a leader in data management and integration software. This market is estimated to reach $1.3B in 2007 according to Forrester Research. The consummation of the transaction is subject to the satisfaction of certain conditions to closing set forth in the acquisition agreement. Once the transaction is completed, MetaMatrix will be integrated into Red Hat’s JBoss division.

While SOA offers a cost-effective opportunity to modernize legacy infrastructures and provide true interoperability across applications and software components, it alone does not resolve data access challenges and the physical and semantic differences among disparate, physical data sources. MetaMatrix eliminates these challenges with a data services layer that decouples applications from their data sources and makes valuable data assets available as services in an SOA, freeing data from single application silos. It does this while simultaneously providing mechanisms for data consistency, security and compliance.

“MetaMatrix offers what is called a federated data services layer, that makes corporate data available as a service to other applications in the environment,” Yeaton said. “What we’ve done with these announcements … is lay out an end-to-end open source infrastructure.”

Yeaton explained that much like Red Hat had done with Netscape Directory, the ultimate goal with MetaMatrix will be to move the technology to the point where it is “fully available on an open source license.” Yeaton said the open source process should take less than a year, and that Red Hat’s business model is such that it is important to get the application to that point as soon as possible. For now, however, the process will begin as a subscription based model.

The acquisition price for MetaMatrix was not disclosed by Red Hat.

I just had to mention this post over at Blogging Hyperic because, well, it mentions me.

Basically, Javier goes into the differences between open source today and open source 10 years ago. He’s a pretty energetic interview, which is good, since SearchEnterpriseLinux will be talking a lot about systems management on Linux this year.

Go take a look, and tell me your systems management horror stories while you’re at it.

In what is quickly becoming a *gulp* systems management series, I am working on a sweet little case study featuring Mynewplace.com. When they aren’t listing apartment rentals online, Mynewplace.com is wrestling with server false alarms triggered by some incompatibilities between Nagios and Resin, an open source application stack they have deployed in their data center.

Mynewplace.com’s IT director John Shin was a great interview, and we often got off on a tangent talking about other aspects of his data center, including his use of Postgres over MySQL and the testing he did with Novell SUSE Linux that didn’t run out so well (he uses Fedora Core 4 today).

Look for some open source systems management original content from SearchEnterpriseLinux.com tomorrow or do some apartment hunting today. Your choice.