This morning I spoke with the exec team from Qlusters (FYI-it's pronounced Clusters, not Q-lusters) about OpenQRM, their open source system management platform.
The goal of OpenQRM is to provide a basis to start uniting other open source management tools in a unified matter that allows for each of use and deployment. The fundamental painpoint that led to the development of OpenQRM was the fact that IT shops were moving to commodity hardware but finding that management tools lacked-which defeated the very economics behind using cheap boxes. This sentiment is very similar to a number of other companies-mainly proprietary vendors who have built large scale apps (Cassatt), and appliances (Levanta) to manage the proliferation of Linux boxes and open source apps.
According to the team, OpenCRM has consistently ranked in the top 20 projects on Sourceforge.net for the last 3 months. There have been approximately 6500 downloads including the live CD which gives you a test drive of the full suite. There are somewhere between 200-500 installations that the company is aware of...possibly more out in the wild.
OpenQRM is interesting because it allows for integration with other applications, rather than forcing a data center change. Every IT shop has some level of monitoring in place so extending rather than replacing has an appeal. And for the moment they feel it's less about competition and more about plugging in various open source applications. Thus far the community has been responsive and supportive of the efforts.
Use Cases
New Data Center:
For new infrastructure things like provisioning are top of the list. The software allows for decoupling of images and policy driven management.
Existing Infrastructure:
If you already have a decent sized infrastructure, things like centralized management consoles have been very popular-aggregating all these disparate applications.
So how does Qlusters make money? There is the open source OpenQRM project that is not entirely supported. Qlusters provides a subscription to the code that is tested with paid support-similar to the RedHat model. In the pipeline is an enterprise version that will include features that will be exclusive to the paid support versions. List price is $750 per managed server, per year and is discounted at volume.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on April 12, 2006 03:05 PM
