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…
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.
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.
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.
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 allthebigplayers 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 toolsandvendors 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.
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.
It’s been an exciting week around GroundWork. The energy in the office has been contagious. We made two announcements this week that have web traffic spiking.
Yesterday, we announced the the release of GroundWork Monitor 6.1 which comes with comes with (drum roll please…) Ubuntu Support! The Debian project has always been near and dear to my heart, so I’m particularly excited about this one. You can get the skinny here. Version 6.1, Enterprise Edition with Ubuntu support, is only $49 for your first hundred devices monitored. Download it here.
For those of you that are glued to your hand-helds, you’re going to jump when you find out that today, we released, Brooklyn, the iPhone app for GroundWork Monitor and Nagios. Marc Masure, of Electrabel posted his praise to our Facebook page, saying, “Iphone -> AppStore-> Click ->Settings change url + login password and live monitoring of my infrastructure. Just one word… PERFECT! Tomorrow i show this to my management :)” You can pick it up at the App Store for $8.99.
Got a great idea for a GroundWork add-on or project? Add it to the comments.
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