On the Road with the Startup Bus

Since early Tuesday morning, I’ve been on a bus heading East to Austin for the South By SouthWest Interactive conference. I’m on the Startup Bus, which has been receiving hype for the past few weeks on various tech rags.

For those of you catching up, the Startup Bus is an experiment in which twenty five tech industry whiz kids have been put on a bus for three days with the task of creating and launching six startups to be pitched to venture capitalists at sxsw. Today is day three. We arrive in Austin this evening.

So far, it has been an exciting experience representing GWOS in this project. The energy here is alive with creativity. Despite close quarters, spotty wifi and sleep deprivation, many of the projects are moving ahead with impressive speed.

When discussing my “real job” with my peers on the bus, I’ve been honored by some of the compliments I’ve received for GroundWork. With our mention in the Wall Street Journal this week, the placement in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, and our impressive increase in our customer base, GWOS is seeing the payoff that comes from hard work and that start-up spirit.

Like the startups being built on this bus, GroundWork was formed by a couple of guys with a great idea, whose best resources were creativity and hard work. Next month will be my fourth year working at GWOS and I’ve been present for many exciting milestones.

One of the startups on this bus will get venture backing. I suspect the others will not make it further than the weekend. The desire to try something that hasn’t been done, or in a way that hasn’t been done will continue to bring great ideas to fruition.

This is Amy Abascal, signing off for now from a bus about three hours East of El Paso, Texas.

Posted in: Applications, Monitoring SIG, News, Open Source | | No Comments |
Tags: silicon valley, startup bus, startups

GWOS Platform redux

Here’s an updated version of the platform usage statistics. This version explicitly breaks out Fedora and RHEL separately - thanks for the comments everyone. In addition I’ve broken out the OS version in use, focusing on Fedora. This is an interesting choice since we don’t offer pre-built virtual appliances or EC2 images on that platform…

Data-o-rama:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/39742313@N03/4422764933/

Posted in: Uncategorized | | 2 Comments |

Ubuntu already running business servers

Savio Rodrigues just posted commentary on the Eclipse 2009 survey which found Ubuntu market share has increased dramatically in the last year or so. I wanted to share some additional data on the same topic from the GWOS community.

The attached chart shows the OS breakdown of people running GWOS products who have chosen to share anonymous usage information with us. This chart is only concerned with the Linux flavour GroundWork Monitor is running on - whether the installation is used to monitor Unix, Linux, Windows, storage, applications or web sites doesn’t affect the overall counts. Since GroundWork Monitor runs on top of Linux (as installed software, in a virtual appliance or on Amazon EC2) the non-Linux categories from the Eclipse survey don’t apply in this case.

The rapid growth of Ubuntu Server in serious, data-center monitoring installations was one of the reasons we added first-class support for the Ubuntu Server platform in our latest 6.1 release. 2010 is shaping up to be an exciting year for Linux vendors of all types.

Link to chart: http://www.flickr.com/photos/39742313@N03/4418870558/

CentOS… 46%
Fedora or RHEL… 25%
Ubuntu… 14%
SUSE… 8%
Debian… 5%
Other… 2%

Posted in: General Monitoring, Uncategorized | | 4 Comments |
Tags: gwos monitor os platform monitoring ubuntu ec2 vm virtu

Exclusive Release of Enterprise and Zendesk Connector Appliance

Hopefully you have participated in GWOS’ barCAMP Deux, which has been held over the last two days with good success.  Over 200 system admins have attended the 11 sessions, and have contributed good questions and insight on real IT monitoring problems.

Today, we are pleased to announce a package that will further assist system and network administrators.  It’s a new virtual appliance that bundles GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Edition (6.1) with a Zendesk connector, built on Novell SLES.

If you are interested in learning more, I recommend you attend the next GWOS barCAMP Deux session that starts at 9am PT/ noon ET today (Thursday, March 4).  Attendance is free.

Introduction to ZenDesk Integration (event # 924 082 525)  password is Welcome1

If you’d like to learn more about the Enterprise + Zendesk connector package - read more here.  More on Zendesk (a hosted help desk and ticketing solution) is available here.

Posted in: Applications, News | | No Comments |
Tags: Enterprise Edition, help desk, IT ticketing, Zendesk

Which virtualization platforms will matter in 24-36 months time?

I was asked this question recently at the first Opscamp in Austin, TX. I sure don’t know who will win or lose but there are some big trends emerging.

There will be a few big winners. It is a crowded space with all the big players vying for market share, or at least install base. Given the costs incurred by ISVs, service providers and end-customers supporting every platform, it’s only a matter of time before we see a handful of clear leaders and the rest drop out. Why only a handful?

Virtualization is an OS feature. This is clearly already happening – Windows Server 2008 R2, RHEV are the products you buy today, not Hyper-V or KVM. In the race to differentiate themselves and grab mind/market share I think we’ll see more ‘Enterprise’ features to be baked-right-in. Live guest migration; block-level replication; virtualization aware I/O. Check; check;check! I can hear the old-school IBMers laughing from here.

It won’t matter whose platform you pick. We already have a de-facto standard for manipulating these virtualized containers, courtesy of a bookseller in Washington State. While it doesn’t have everything we need yet, there is a nice ecosystem of tools and vendors bridging the gaps in the current implementations.

It’s all about the applications. While the analyst community keep (or do you mean “are keen” on measuring the number of virtualized servers, a more interesting (and harder to obtain) metric might be the number of virtualized applications. We’re rapidly reaching the point where mid-sized companies can virtualize all the key applications they’re still running in-house. Not all of them will choose to do so, but ops guys managing the business-critical, custom applications at the heart of many of small and medium-sized businesses sure could use the efficiency bump. Start moving software bits instead of atoms!

What do you think? Have I got it all wrong? Join the discussion below.

Posted in: General Monitoring | | No Comments |
Tags: network management software, network monitoring software, vitualization

Release 6.1 – now with 105% more customer goodness

2009 was a fantastic year for GWOS, the investments we made in the Release 6 platform, Flex pricing and Enterprise Quickstart paying off in a massive increase in the GWOS install base.  Those new users brought a lot of new use-cases and ideas and suggestions for improvements we’ve chopped, diced, sautéed and baked into our first release of 2010.

One of the biggest changes we’ve introduced is support for Ubuntu Server in both the 8.04 LTS and 9.10 variants. Many of the customers I spoke with were impressed by the quality of the Ubuntu Server platform in their data-center and appreciate the convenience that comes from running Ubuntu on their desktop too. Of course we continue to support RedHat Enterprise Linux and Novell’s SLES – the latter of which is the basis of our popular SuSE-powered virtual appliance. A full run-down of the contents of the new release is available now.

We’ve got a busy year planned out with some exciting new capabilities in the works. We’re always happy to get ideas and suggestions for new areas we should be looking at.  Please join the discussion on Twitter, Facebook or MonitoringForge.org.

Posted in: Applications, News, Open Source | | 1 Comment |
Tags: appliance, GWOS, mofo, monitoring, Novell, redhat, release, ubuntu