How Present is Open Source in the Datacenter?

GroundWork teamed up with Jay Lyman from the 451 Group and InformationWeek and hosted a live webcast titled “Open Source Inside the Datacenter” on October 29th. There were over 500 registrants and roughly 200 attendees the live event.

You can view the hour-long webcast archive now.

During our webcast we conducted polling questions. The results are certainly interesting enough to share with you. I don’t know the number of participants that answered each question - but with our attendance rate of 200 - it’s probably ample.

The common monitoring software used in datacenters are:

Big 4 (HP, IBM, CA and BMC) = 27%
Non Big 4 = 9%
Open Source = 17%
and a combination of all of the above = 23%.
The remaining 23% answered none of the above.

The last category probably included those who self-built/ home grown their monitoring systems or used an option that felt wasn’t represented in the categories. At first I expected that the attendees were managing small datacenters with the above results - but that wasn’t necessarily the case.

The next question asked for the number of datacenter devices being monitored:

1 - 50 devices = 20%
51 - 200 = 26%
201 - 1000 = 23%
over 1000 devices = 31%

Since 27% of the attendees used a Big 4 monitoring option and over 50% of the participants monitor more than 200 devices - it proves that the Big 4 aren’t the only vendor relied on for large environments.

Our next polling question was about annual maintenance fees to support the datacenter management - The surge of pure open source and home grown apps were certainly reflected in the answers:

$0 fees = 12%
Under $20,000 = 18%
$20,000 - $50,000 = 16%
> $50,000 = 23% (probably those who are using a Big 4 product)
No clue = 31%

Since everyone is feeling the pinch of our economic conditions - if you are a part of the 31% who doesn’t know how much you are paying in maintenance fees - I recommend reading this cost analysis report which shows you how to assess what you are probably paying in some instances.

The last polling question gathered what attendees wanted to see their monitoring solution integrated with. Statistically, this shows that correlating a problem with a process that will drive resolution is still the top priority for most datacenters.

Ticketing and Monitoring integration = 48%
Provisioning/ Configuration and Ticketing = 13%
Provisioning/ Configuration and Monitoring = 12%
Monitoring and other systems = 6%
Other = 17%
Not Important = 11%

Thanks to those who attended the webcast and contributed your opinions. If you are interested to know what open source tools are common inside the datacenter and which ones have a way to go from a maturity perspective - I recommend watching the webcast. You can also post direct comments and questions about the webcast on that page too.