As our CEO Paul Maritz mentioned at yesterday’s VMworld keynote, our industry has hit a tipping point where virtualization has surpassed the physical computing paradigm, due to a need for IT to quickly respond to dynamic business needs at ever-improving price points. To ensure even greater agility and value, the next destination for our industry is cloud computing. Making this shift requires a pragmatic, evolutionary approach that leverages investments in existing architecture.

Yesterday, Rod Johnson, SVP of VMware’s Cloud Application Platform Division, described how VMware vFabric is a key element of enabling our customers to reach this next destination of cloud computing. Delivering the agility and value promised by cloud computing requires a new kind of application — cloud applications — that have their own unique characteristics:

• Dynamic architectures
• Elastic capacity
• Extreme scalability
• Open choice

How do cloud applications change performance monitoring?

These characteristics of cloud applications bring new requirements to application performance monitoring. For instance, dynamic architectures and elastic capacity imply a datacenter defined by constant flux, with pools of hundreds, even thousands of VMs continually being started and stopped, vMotioned, reverted to snapshots, and so on.

This blistering rate of change is a natural outgrowth of responsiveness to business needs. But it is impossible to manage with manually maintained, complex configuration files used by legacy monitoring tools. The only way to get ahead of it is to use a monitoring product that can automatically discover changes to your entire application infrastructure — everything from the application code itself to the vSphere host. Hyperic Autodiscovery does exactly that, updating itself within moments of app infrastructure changes.

The extreme scalability required by cloud applications requires a lot of virtual machines – which leads to a firehose of performance data. For instance, a typical Hyperic customer will collect a million performance metrics per minute. It’s not at all hard to get to this volume of metrics, since we have a number of customers running 1000 (or more!) virtual machines, each with a Hyperic agent collecting about 1000 metrics. So, even though we’re not talking about Google-level scalability, application performance data become a performance problem in itself if not managed properly. Thankfully, Hyperic is engineered to handle high volumes of application performance data.

Open choice means that cloud applications can be built from a wide range of components. For instance, as Rod pointed out yesterday, cloud applications might use WebSphere, WebLogic, JBoss, and our own vFabric tc Server, as well as public cloud platforms, for their Java application server tier. It’s critical to have a monitoring tool that supports a range of popular web application technologies out of the box. But no one tool can support every conceivable technology. It’s understandable – there’s no way one vendor, no matter how innovative, can keep up with the thousands of other innovative companies in our industry. So in addition, it’s critical to have a monitoring tool that makes it easy to build custom monitoring plug-ins, and makes its built-in plugins open source to provide a wide range of code to reference and leverage. Hyperic delivers on this front, providing approximately 50,000 performance metrics for 75 web application technologies, as well as open source plugin code and a fully-supported plugin API that has been used by third parties to extend the range of technologies monitored by Hyperic.

What’s next for Hyperic?

We’re demonstrating vFabric Hyperic live at VMworld, in the main VMware booth. Come see for yourself how Hyperic adjusts to changes in virtual infrastructure in near real-time. Later this month, we’ll demonstrate Hyperic at Oracle Open World in San Francisco, September 19-23, and after that, we’ll be at Spring One 2GX in Chicago, October 19-22.

We’re committed to making Hyperic the leading choice for monitoring cloud applications, with their inherent dynamicism, scale, and openness, and we’re looking forward to working with you — our open source community, our users, and our customers — to make this happen.

See eValid’s functional test engine in “monitoring mode” perform availability and performance checks of complex web applications — including AJAX applications.  Once the data is collected by eValid, the information is transported and displayed in the Hyperic network status indicator system alongside other critical performance metrics.

Thursday, 19 March 2009 — 11:00am PST / 2:00pm EST

Learn More > https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/617161488

This Webinar will cover:

• How to create reliable, reproducible tests quickly and inexpensively.
• How to tag key performance data to monitor application performance.
• How to handle playback synchronization in AJAX applications.
• How to integrate eValid results into Hyperic HQ.
• How to include eValid-produced data into the Hyperic architecture.
• Show how Hyperic reports application performance results.
• Explain how to integrate eValid data into status monitoring products.

Learn More > https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/617161488

Hope to see you all there!

Members of the Hyperic team will be our booth #24 all day Saturday and Sunday (Feb 21 and 22).  Can you imagine a better way to spend your weekend?  Bring your toughest monitoring questions to us – we’ll do our best to answer them on the spot.  Ask us about how we are helping the world’s largest SaaS providers monitor and manage their environments.

If you are in Southern California and have not signed up for SCaLE, it’s not too late! Passes are still available for one day at $10 (limited access) or for the entire conference at $70 (full access). Send us an email and we’ll send you a code for 40% off the admission fee.

We’re looking forward to the conference and hope to see you all there!

Amazon AWS Loves CloudStatus.com, Here’s The Proof (Hyperic Video 2/2) from Toon Vanagt on Vimeo.

My favorite is Virtualization.com’s for a few reasons:

1. Trav still had the mohawk in that video. Yes, people – the girlfriend won, and he is now back to the short haired Nebraska boy his momma knew well.
2. A couple typos turned Javier into a Xavier and Trav got promoted to a CTO!
3. Last, and definitely mostly – the videographer, Toon Vanaght managed to catch Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels the next day at Structure and get it on tape that Amazon thinks CloudStatus is important and good for their customers!

OSCON — Portland — 7/23 – 7/24

The following happened between 6:00p – 8:00p (7/23)

It was a long day. I traveled for 8 hours, worked the concrete floors for another 5. Hyperic booth is bumping between show sessions. OSCON is still a show packed with sessions, talks, BoFs and panels. I’ve had nothing but orange juice since I left home. Colin Charles from MySQL APAC invites us to a Sun/MySQL/Zend bash. Red Hat Community Architect, Greg Dekoenigsberg and I decide to remedy the food situation and grab some grub before the party. We take the MAX to Kell’s, a great Irish Pub, and in great Irish tradition we forgo food for Guinness. Which, to its credit, passes quite nicely for a meal. Though gdk does don a skirt briefly, and orders a snakebite. Speaking of skirts, ask him about his New Orleans relief trip one day. You won’t regret it.

The following happened between 8:00 – 8:00:30

Jack Aboutboul from the Fedora Project drives us to the convention center, parking tickets flapping from under his windshield wipers. Despite taking several detours, it takes less than a minute. Jack’s from NYC, and he drives accordingly. Ever been on Mr Toad’s Wild Ride at Disney? It’s like that, but with a Metallica soundtrack.

The following happened between 8:01 – 8:02

I check under the rental car for hippies, bikes, or that poor old woman I’m sure he plowed into the river.

The following happened between 8:02 – 8:15

Party is thin. Carny food. Tricycles. Sumo suits. The group of three vows to never sumo.

The following happened between 8:15 – 10:00

While drinking away our boredom, the party took off. Lots more folks, tricycles have become a hazard, corn dogs are getting low, I can’t help thinking of Lord of the Flies.

The following happened between 10:01 – 10:30

Don’t ask me how it happened, all I know is Jack just cleaned the Sumo ring with someone and has challenged all comers. Next thing I know, money has been thrown down, and Jack and I are locked in the match of the evening. It starts like WWF and ends like UFC. I tell him he looks like Turtle from Entourage. He drops the People’s Elbow on me. The refs give up. Flash bulbs go off. It goes on and on. There’s blood. There’s debate to this day over who won. Decorum prevents me from bragging, so I’ll just give this little hint: I kicked his freakin’ arse! In your *face*, Turtle!

The following happened between 10:30 – 10:45

Woman is scolding me for some reason for beating up a girl. Jack comes over, realizing he’s been mistaken for a girl and punches her in the face.  Worn out from several hours in sumo gear, she smites him verily. Mayhem ensues. Elephant ears and popcorn fly through the air, the shuffle board table is on fire, I dump the remaining corn dogs into my backpack and roll the cotton candy machine into the security staff as a diversion. I escape on a stolen tricycle, firing foam rocket and balsa wood glider swag over my shoulder.

The following happened between 11:00 – 11:30

I take the MAX to my hotel. Or so I think. I get off at the wrong stop. I call and the hotel staff tells me I’m within “walking distance”. Though the hotel is indeed on 82nd St, it’s five miles away. I won’t realize this for… awhile.

The following happens between 11:30p – 12:45a (7/24)

Why do the crappiest neighborhoods always get to be called MLK Blvd? I walk five miles past some shady stuff. You could fill a library with all the euphemisms for “brothel”. What exactly is private erotic tanning? Why do you need it 24/7/365? I barter corn dogs for directions and protection from folks along the way. I’m offered a few items and services in exchange for money or in-kind services along the way. Although flattered by how pretty they say my mouth is, I politely decline. I notice cabs don’t seem to stop on this section of road. I call my hotel occasionally to be sure I’m still heading the right way, and for words of encouragement. Did I mention this is all in flip flops? I’m reminded of the Steven Wright joke “Any place is walking distance if you’ve got the time.”

The following happens ??? – ???

At some point, all the sumo, empty stomach, bumpy train rides, lingering smell of carny food in my shirt, and endless walking reminds me of that orange juice I had almost 24 hours prior, when suddenly… [THE NETWORK HAS REMOVED THIS SENTENCE FOR BEING GROSS]… but I felt better afterward, despite the unsettlingly orange taste in my mouth. And that cop was sure nice to stop and ask me how I was doing. I hope he enjoys the MySQL boxers and “Get Your Geek On!” tee shirt. Coulda used a ride man, but hey… thanks anyway.

The following happens between 1:00 – 1:30

I hit a dead end, kid at the bus stop shows me a shortcut to my hotel. “Go to that junction box, climb through the hole in the fence, walk down the ditch til you hit the wall of graffiti, hop that wall, walk down the railroad tracks… don’t worry it’s cool down there.”

The following happens between 1:30 – 1:31

Hotel lady greets me. The one I’ve been calling for directions all night. “I can’t believe you walked… you should have got back on the train to the airport stop, the courtesy shuttle runs all night, about a four minute ride…” Something in me snaps. I tried not to cry, but I may have let out a squeak. She adds cheerily “Guess I shoulda told you that the first time you called, huh? Teeheehee.” Channeling Jack, I punch her in the face.

The following happens between 9:00a – 5:00p

Showtime. I wake to realize neither I, nor Jack punched any women in the face, nor did a riot and food fight break out. But I am sad to say that way too much of the rest of the story is true. The show is still crawling with community folks. An amazing number of community managers. I was on the “Evolution of Community” panel with some of them. I think I broke my personal record for cursing in public, and even introduced Jono Bacon to a new one. Ross Turk wondered if he was an orange among apples. He’s the community manager at SourceForge, which is a community of communities. Making him a manager among managers. So not only is he an apple, he’s a big apple. Ross “The Big Apple” Turk. You heard it here first. Another day of great sessions. Brian Behlendorf still can’t sit in the audience without being outed by the presenter for being an inspiration. Michael Tiemann can’t just wear a baseball hat and not be recognized. My favorite session was “The Art of Community” all female Lightning Talks led by Dawn Foster and Danese Cooper. Creative, informative and moving. And only Danese herself got gonged for going over time.

The following happens between 6:00p and ???

Hyperic was a platinum Sponsor for the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards. Free speech, free beer and a sister party hosted by OpenSourcery called Beerforge. The highlights were free tattoos (Real ones. Too bad for me the line was too long to get an ironic “freedom” in Mandarin tattoo), DJ, an XBox game lounge (where language barriers did not stop me and my European friends from pwning Halo 3) and a singer named Angela Davis, most of which you can see in a video re-cap by Robin Miller over at Linux.com: http://www.linux.com/feature/142948

My favorite moment was Sam Ramji of Microsoft presenting an award to OpenOffice.org. He was a good sport, the irony was lost on no one.

If you’ll be joining us at OSCON this year, be sure and check out the Evolution of Community panel featuring yours truly.

Over the past ten years, nothing has impacted business more than community. Whether through the openness of software development spurred by Linux or the dismantling of media empires through blogging, the rise of communities has been the driving force in how we work and live today. But what’s next? For open source developers, what has to happen to maintain and grow the communities they’ve built? What happens to communities when successful projects are acquired by big corporate behemoths? What happens to communities when their projects fail?

Join a panel of those who get a first-hand look at what it takes to manage some of the highest-profile communities in open source: Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier from OpenSUSE, Ross Turk from SourceForge.net, Jono Bacon from Ubuntu, John Mark Walker from CollabNet and Jeremy Hogan from Hyperic. What trends are they seeing across their communities? What advice can they give other community managers? What’s worked and what hasn’t for them? What’s on the horizon for each of their communities?

More info here. If you register now, you can get 15% off using this coupon code: os08s15. ]]> http://blog.hyperic.com/the-evolution-of-community/feed/ 0 http://blog.hyperic.com/velocity-wraps-up/ http://blog.hyperic.com/velocity-wraps-up/#comments Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:02:49 +0000 Stacey Schneider http://blog-staging.hyperic.com/hyperic/?p=320 The Velocity Conference wrapped up yesterday. It was a sold out show – and just the kind of crowd that we like to see! The whole conference was based on web operations, and the conference goers were very enthusiastic. Many of the sessions were standing room only. It was personally great for me to be able to meet face-to-face with many of our customers and community members which I normally don’t get to see – some of which came all the way from Europe for the event. Quite exciting!

Of course, also exciting was the launch of CloudStatus – and Javier’s keynote. To see him in action, check out this video:

For a first year event, to bring in that many people is quite a feat – so congrats to the entire O’Reilly team that put it together. As many know, there were two other events that also “competed” for the same web ops audience’s attention this week here in the Bay Area. Structure 08 is going on today, and Cloud Camp was last night. However, in speaking with the O’Reilly staff last night – I shared that I think it was a good thing. The confluence of events in the same general vicinity made it so many folks were able to travel from Europe and around the country because there was not one, but three events here that they couldn’t miss.

As the world moves to cloud computing, service level insight gets foggier. Don’t let your performance get lost in the clouds.

www.cloudstatus.com

Removing this “undifferentiated heavy lifting” (hereto referred as UHL) from your cycles is supposed to free operations to spend more time actually operating. As I was listening to the talk, I wondered how many folks believe there is some competitive advantage in UHL? Certainly choice of hardware, network architecture, data center setup all fall under UHL and can mean the difference between success at scale versus utter failure. Nonetheless, the argument is that you shouldn’t reinvent the wheel and should take advantage from those providers (Amazon in this case) who do the UHL for you, right? Well, a lot of people certainly think so based on how much press and use is being directed towards the cloud.

This begs raises the question: “If racking boxes, configuring OS’s and so forth is UHL today, what will be UHL tomorrow?” That question is material to companies in the systems management market because getting caught on the wrong side of UHL means your future is (as our favorite magic 8 ball would say) “Outlook Not So Good”.

Luckily, UHL today is mostly about the pain associated with hardware and network provisioning and configuration. These problems are bounded just enough to make it feasible for someone to simply delegate them to a cloud provider (as many already have). Of course, the implications to management vendors focused on managing UHL tasks are not pleasant if you buy the idea that most applications will move into this sort of an environment. If you buy this vision, then conceivably the future will require one GIANT Tivoli license for the One-Cloud-Provider-To-Rule-Them-All, right? Heh, not quite, but it’s fun to think about it that way!

The reality is that this trend is forcing both service providers as well as application developers to rethink their operation strategy. Providers want to be more like clouds, developers want to run inside them.

Why rethink their ops strategy? Because the stuff that sits above the UHL layer… the middleware, the databases, and most importantly, the code that makes up a given application present the most daunting challenges due to their complexity. This leaves a meaty management problem yet to be solved. One that has more to do with managing complex software stacks with components which might reside inside or outside of the cloud and with an ‘elasticity’ (to borrow another one of Werner’s terms) which demands equal agility in the management layer than what is found in the software stack.

This is where the next big wave of innovation will happen in the management space, and we’re excited to be a part of it. Come visit our booth at the Web 2.0 Expo this week, and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

This year definitely had a different feel, and of course that had a lot to do with Sun’s influence. It felt like it was almost a new event, a chapter 2 for MySQL, and its ecosystem of vendors and customers. There were more people – I don’t know exact numbers, but it felt appeared to be twice as packed. The exhibit hall was the same, but we took up a bit more space than last year and certainly there were much fancier booths – ours included! We even gave away multiple prizes this year – our fun 8-ball tshirts, and a couple remote control helicopters. Scott Baird and Mike Hogan were the lucky winners this year.

The one thing that hasn’t changed is our fit with the MySQL customers. This year we met several of our own customers and users face-to-face – including an entire legion of the Rackspace/Mosso guys. I had dozens of conversations with MySQL users managing the LAM-* stack, and showed them how Hyperic helps wrangle all the moving parts. Several of them were lined up when the exhibit hall opened the next day to tell me how their deployment went the night before! Very cool. We spend a lot of time talking to users – via the forums, email and phone – so to see their faces the next day after they deployed is a really cool experience.

And this experience wasn’t mine alone, Hyperic has grown quite a bit in the past year, almost tripling in size. So we had many more people from all departments hanging out on the floor and interacting live with users. Check out our own Mark Deadder, sales guru, wooing a small crowd while flashing his broken wing. (Minutes before, Mark fatally crashed the demo helicopter – perhaps if we could monitor it with HQ, the wing would still be attached!)

Thanks, MySQL – we’re looking forward to next year already!

Hyperic will have a booth in the expo. We’re at booth #12, so stop by and see us. In keeping with the theme of the event – informal and irreverent – we promise to have a fun booth for everyone, with some great shwag giveaways and prizes.

Javier will appear in the panel I’ll Show You My Forge If You Show Me Yours at 10:30am on Wednesday, March 26. The topic of discussion will be how you engage users and developers and sell them on the forge concept, and there will be a whole lot of expertise on hand to discuss it. Besides Javier, there’s also Rod Johnson, CEO of SpringSource, Dave Rosenberg, CEO of MuleSource, and Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier, OpenSUSE’s Community Director. Moderating is Eric Knorr, Editor-in-chief of InfoWorld. Now *that’s* a high-powered panel.

As for me, I’m apparently the only person crazy enough to go up against Mark Shuttleworth, John Roberts and Marten Mickos in the 10:30am timeslot on Tuesday. I am moderating the panel The Community Imperative: Building and Leveraging Community into IT at 10:30am on Tuesday, March 25. I’m blessed with a very intriguing panel featuring Russ Danner from the Christian Science Publishing Society, Gautam Guliani from Kaplan Test Prep & Admissions, Paolo Juvara from OpenBravo, and Gianugo Rabellino from Sourcesense. Look for some interesting back and forth, as these guys all have different perspectives on community building.

I’m really looking forward to this, as I’ve always been a fan of OSBC. If you’re going to OSBC and have already seen Mickos, Roberts and Shuttleworth speak multiple times, then this is the panel for you!

Our beautiful booth:

It flies!

When Linux toddlers run wild:

Oh sure, he looks cute now… If only you had seen him wrecking helicopter carnage:

I arrived in Dallas on Tuesday evening for an open source systems management BoF – to which I was 15 minutes late on account of missing a connecting flight in Denver, but I digress… I was one of two vendors represented there, with Mark Hinkle of Zenoss being the other. The rest of the BoF attendees, about 15 others, were sysadmins from various organizations: a couple of universities, a smattering of smaller companies, and at least one large financial institution. All were using a variety of open source systems management tools. Of course, being a USENIX conference, all were using these tools in a *NIX environment.

It shouldn’t surprise you that they were using open source tools. What might surprise you is *why* they were using them – ease of use. Most of these tools are not excessively complicated, and you don’t have to go through a sales organization to get to them. Thus, the barrier to entry is miniscule, especially for a competent sysadmin who knows how to modify their configuration to fit a particular environment. The next most popular reason was flexibility – being Unix admins, this means something other than what a non-Unix admin might infer. Flexibility for a Unix admin means it easily integrates with whatever scripts the sysadmin has at the ready in ~/bin or other Unix-based tools that perform singular functions. Cost was 3rd on the list. As one sysadmin pointed out, they worked for a billion-dollar company – shelling out $$$ for more software was a drop in their IT budget bucket. This should speak volumes for systems management software vendors: our future customers will drop their money on solutions that fit their needs on their schedule and within their existing environment. Vendors take heed.

Later, I met up with Luke Kanies, of Puppet fame, and Scott D, who was an IT ops guy for a major banking institution. Luke is fond of railing on the IT industry as a whole, and this time was no exception, comparing modern sysadmin practices to a developer writing in assembly language. Luke also expresses a desire to bring the concept of design patterns to the sysadmin profession, further linking the ideas of administration and management to software development. Scott regaled me with how his employer deployed an AFS-based distributed systems environment and discussed the topic at LISA in 1995. Time permitting, I hope to follow up with both of them for interviews on this blog.

At some point, a wandering Elvis impersonator decided to pay the LISA confines a visit. Turns out he was actually lost and seeking assistance. A USENIX staffer soon set him straight, explaining that DEFCON would be held at another time, date and location.

Other highlights included meeting customers, users, and prospective users / customers. It’s always interesting to see what people are doing with HQ and learn what we could do to improve our software. It also didn’t hurt that I was a roving swag machine, handing out trinkets with abandon. Let’s just say that high-quality retractable ethernet cables don’t last long at a USENIX conference!

Last week, some of the best and brightest open source companies in the bay area congregated at Hyperic Headquarters, and played a spirited game of Wii Tennis to vie for the title of Open Source Champion and its prize: The Golden Racket.

The title gives it away, Hyperic won. Specifically, Scott Feldstein (aka scottmf) rose to the occasion and took the prize:

It was a great event though – and although winning was nice, it was made even nicer by getting to blow off some steam and socialize with the other companies that came. Thanks to JasperSoft, MuleSource, Marketcetera (apparently hosting next time!) and MySQL for making the event so fun. Here are some photos for your enjoyment:

We used our new, unbuilt space to host the event. Part housewarming, part wii-fest!

Zack Urlocker from MySQL had the great idea of adding Guitar Hero to the mix. So much fun!

That’s me on the guitar. Let’s just say I’ve had a little practice…

This is actually Scott playing (left) tennis. Although this was taken earlier in the night, we can see Scott was well on his way to his winning streak.

Thanks again to everyone for coming to such a fun night. I look forward to the next round of defending the Golden Racket!

Watch for an updated date and time on the evite.

See you next week sports fans.

As we approach Halloween, Hyperic continues its ‘tradition’ of bringing the daily challenges of web operations folks to the limelight by creating a contest to share these “Nightmare on Web Street”. The winning story will get a Nintendo Wii so they can kill time while waiting for the next crisis event. The contest begins today. To apply, submit a short essay (no more than 500 words) at www.hyperic.com/community/nightmare by 11:59 pm on October 30th, 2007. We’ll post all eligible stories on the site within 24 hours of submission, and on Halloween, the Hyperic team will vote for and announce the winner.

So, if you’re an ops guy, sys admin, or one of those multi-talented overworked IT folks with a good disaster story, share it! We’ll have a good time reading it and you just might win a Wii.

Given that I consider the Wii to be the foosball table of the 21st century (no disrespect to foos, of course), I am more than happy to respond to his silly antics by calling him out to swing by our office with his crew so they can see how our crew unwinds after a record Q3. Besides, we can’t have all these “web too-ooh” companies having all the fun while the infrastructure companies do all the work.

October 25th, 5:30 pm. Hyperic offices. We’ll battle for the golden racket and the bragging rights for the foreseeable future.

We’ll supply the Wii, refreshments, and of course a spectacular mule-kicking! And for any of you other open source companies in the bay – if you have any Wii skills, bring it on. Reply to the blog and we’ll send you an evite.

(from left to right: Stacey, John Mark, and Javier)

Hail to the victors! Of course, awards are nice, but the only award that really counts is whether we satisfy our users and customers – the fine folks that depend on us.

And it appears I’ll get to drop in on the last day of Ubuntu Live as well – good things.

Here’s Doug, Hyperic’s CTO, with Roger Strukhoff, Group Publisher and Editorial Director of SYS-CON Media:

Here is a video recording of the Redmonk guys interviewing Javer:

And here’s the continuation of that video:

And finally, here are a couple of wacky “generals” forcing .orgZone participants to “surrender to open source”:

• Charles Lee, Hyperic VP of Engineering, gave a talk on Monday at CommunityOne about how we managed to remove data bottlenecks and scale our PostgreSQL usage to accomodate our huge data aggregation.
• Heather and I hung out at our CommunityOne pod, where we would assault unsuspecting passersby. Ok, not really, but we enjoyed talking to attendees.
• All sorts of things happened in the Hyperic booth on the main JavaOne floor:
  • We gave away a Wii!
  • Note to self: Whenever I want to enter a contest, make sure to fill out the “Title” field as “Winner”:
• And now for the wily .orgZone…
  • John Sachs, doing online support, oblivious to the camera:
  • A couple of… uh… wild and crazy guys:
• Javier shares a laugh with Michael Cote and James Governor of Redmonk (more on that later – with video!):

And that’s it for now… I’ll post some videos and more photos soon.

Hyperic will have a booth there, #508, and the exhibit hours are Wednesday, December 6, noon – 7pm and Thursday, December 7, 10 am – 2 pm. To kick things off, there will be a birds-of-a-feather meeting on Tuesday, December 5, at 7pm, titled “Systems Management is Dead, Long Live Systems Management Consortiums”. Representatives from both the OMC, as well as the COSMOS Project, will be in attendance for an informal discussion with real, live sysadmins – the ones whose jobs are affected by all of this talk about open source collaboration.

If you are headed to LISA, please do look us up.

” 3) Hyperic – System Management with Open Source

System management seemed to be a frequent theme for the show, with Hyperic announcing that they were opening the source of their app with a commerical open source model. Built on Struts, the product is installed on premise with compatibility for Nagios plug-ins – definitely a killer feature. Many system management and provisioning tools at the show focused exclusively on easing the painful process of implement or managing a Nagios installation. Hyperic appears to have taken that one step further with a completely new app with auto-discoverability out the wazoo, while including support for the tried and true Nagios checks we’re already familiar with. Every sysadmin with the Nagios hangover should be looking at the Hyperic demo for relief.”

Honestly, we didn’t pay him for that :)

Found our real estate in the Novell booth. I hate pods, but at least we’re there in the mix. We had just put out a press release on the impressive demand for our open source releases since July. We have some great talks with partners and friends, including the 451 guys. We co-sponsored the PostgreSQL dinner at Destino, where I met Joe Brockmeier.

Day 2: Wednesday, August 16
It looks like several folks are stopping by after hearing about us the day before, which is a great sign. The day is spent giving demos to mostly potential customers and is much busier than Tuesday. It looks like people are really catching wind of our efforts and appreciate them. Later, it’s on to the MySQL party, where we corner the SugarCRM IT guy (thanks, Clint!), hobnob with Marten, and run into Nick Halsey, who has just left SpikeSource for JasperSoft. Then it was on to the IDG/OSDL reception, where I ran into old IDG co-workers and friends.

Day 3: Thursday, August 17

And the final day – the 3rd day is always the slowest. Ran into our head cheerleader, Stephen Walli. Seriously, every time I see Stephen, I’m always impressed at how well he sings our praises. Spent some time in the PostgreSQL and Ubuntu booths, where I run into old and new friends.

Final Verdict:

It was a good show. For the size of our real estate (tiny pod), the total preparation time (minimal), and the fact that we had no real presence (see “pod” references, above), we had a really good connection with attendees. Those that came by liked us, and apparently, they told others.

Open Source IT Management Platform Will Be Demo’ed at LinuxWorld Expo

SAN FRANCISCO, CA –August 15, 2006 – Hyperic, Inc., announced today that Hyperic HQ, the first open source platform for managing all commercial and open source components of the web infrastructure and the first IT management platform of any kind to enable deployment in 60 minutes or less, has been downloaded more than 10,000 times since it first became available through an open source license 60 days ago. The brisk download activity has been accompanied by a steady rise in the number of inquiries about the enterprise version, which includes advanced features as well as technical support.

Hyperic moved to an open source license model after two years of selling its previously commercial IT management solution to over 100 companies including several Fortune 100 corporations.

“The number of downloads of Hyperic HQ as well as the number of potential customers who have asked to see the enterprise edition clearly demonstrate need for a powerful, easy-to-deploy solution architected to manage large scale web infrastructure,” said Hyperic CEO Javier Soltero. “This is an exceptionally strong start for our commercial open source initiative and a signal that companies are actively looking for an easier, more cost-effective way of managing their IT assets.”

Hyperic will demo Hyperic HQ at the LinuxWorld Expo that opens today in San Francisco. The company will be exhibiting as a member of the Novell Partner Pavilion in Booth #604.

The Hyperic HQ open source management platform provides a suite of free inventory auto-discovery, monitoring, alerting and portal tools that can be deployed out of the box in less than an hour, using plug-ins for the specific commercial and/or open source IT assets used in the customer’s environment. Support for products without plug-ins can be rapidly added to Hyperic HQ through its free open source development kit. The platform manages all components of the web infrastructure, including operating systems as well as web, application and database servers. The platform is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Downloads are available at www.hyperic.org and www.sourceforge.net/projects/hyperic-hq.

Hyperic HQ Enterprise Subscription, available for a yearly fee per managed computer, adds enterprise support as well as advanced features including remote resource control, role-based security, log/security event tracking, policy-based management and problem identification.

About Hyperic Inc.

Hyperic offers the first open source IT management solution that discovers, monitors, analyzes and controls all open source and commercial enterprise IT assets from a single unified interface. The Hyperic HQ Management Platform has been adopted by enterprises of all sizes, including several Fortune 100 companies, since the San Francisco-based company was founded in March 2004. For more information, visit www.hyperic.com.
lkornblatt@sspr.com

World-Class Organizations Partner Together to Offer Enhanced Apache Geronimo Monitoring and Management Functionality

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–May 15, 2006–Virtuas Open Source Solutions, the premier provider of enterprise-level support and enablement services for Apache Geronimo and other leading open source software, and Hyperic, a leading provider of open management solutions for IT operations, announced today a strategic alliance to provide improved management and monitoring capabilities for Apache Geronimo.

“As customers increasingly turn towards the use of Apache Geronimo in their corporate environments, they are realizing that a combination of ‘best of breed’ technologies together with ‘best practices’ in architecture and design is a key to their success,” said Matt Filios, President of Virtuas. “Virtuas is pleased to work with Hyperic to offer unsurpassed products and services to the Geronimo community.”

Working together with Virtuas to enhance product performance, the Hyperic HQ Apache Geronimo plug-in is now available to customers seeking enterprise-class manageability solutions combined with the Apache Software Foundation’s J2EE Application Server. In addition, the companies will continue to work together to evolve features and functionality both within Hyperic and Apache Geronimo technologies.

“As part of our commitment to providing customers with complete management solutions for their entire open source infrastructure, we are excited about our partnership with Virtuas,” says Javier A. Soltero, CEO of Hyperic. “By providing this enhanced functionality for Geronimo, we provide customers with enterprise-quality choices for their open source middleware and the ability to deploy with confidence.”

A live “demo” of Hyperic HQ for Geronimo, along with additional information on Hyperic HQ, will be available for viewing at the Virtuas booth (#1520) at this year’s JavaOne conference in San Francisco, Calif., from May 16 – May 18. In addition, both organizations will be co-sponsoring “Apache Geronimo Live!”, an event to celebrate the project on May 17 at the W Hotel in San Francisco from 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

About Virtuas Open Source Solutions, LLC

Since 1999, Virtuas has provided the Global 2000 with world-class enterprise software solutions. By providing knowledge enablement services in Consulting, Education, Development and other support offerings around leading Open Source Java software including Tomcat, Geronimo, Spring, Hibernate, JBoss and JSF/MyFaces, Virtuas empowers organizations by imparting open source software expertise and enabling self-sufficiency within IT. For more information, visit: www.virtuas.com.

About Hyperic, Inc.

Privately held and based in San Francisco, California, Hyperic is the leading provider of predictable and open IT management solutions. Hyperic IT management solutions help companies realize the vision of unified application management by combining ease of deployment, low overhead and comprehensive support for both open source and commercial technologies with predictable, open pricing. Founded in March 2004, Hyperic’s world-class team of professionals is experienced in commercial and open source application development and large-scale IT operations. Visit www.hyperic.com.

Contact:
Virtuas Open Source Solutions, LLC
Kristin Lukos, 303-260-7300
kristin@virtuas.com
www.virtuas.com

Source: Virtuas Open Source Solutions, LLC