The San Francisco, California-based company has also announced a new customer in the form of hi5 Networks, owner of social networking site hi5.com.
We’ve been open source for a year in July and our progress has been successful. The next stage is to empower contribution, especially around the area of plug-ins, Hyperic CEO, Javier Soltero, told Computer Business Review. Open sourcing a complex piece of technology like HQ we weren’t expecting people to roll up their sleeves and write our code for us. The plug-in development kit has always been in the product. How we have the Forge to contribute back to.
Having spun the HQ systems management software out of open source support and services firm Covalent, the Hyperic released the software under the General Public License a year ago. While the code has always been available on Source Forge, Soltero explained Hyperic’s reasons for building its own plug-in development site.
The reason we chose to roll our own Forge is it’s a combination of contributing code, finding code, and tying it into forums and bug tracking, he said, adding that he expected HyperForge developers to include end users as well as ISV partners.
Alongside the launch of HyperForge, the company also announced the release of nine new plug-ins, bringing its total to 55. Available on the forge, the new plug-ins are for IBM Informix, Squid, lighttpd, qmail, JOnAS, CruiseControl, NetScaler, ZXTM, and WxGoos.
The company has grown to 250 customers in less than a year thanks to its focus on high-volume, web-based management requirements, and recent customer win, hi5.com, is a prime example.
The social networking site boasts 60 million members, 4.5 million daily unique visitors, and 200 million daily page views, and has deployed Hyperic HQ 3.0 to monitor and manage more than 9,000 resources.
The company’s infrastructure includes a Java-based application running on Resin application server and Apache web servers, Novell’s SUSE Linux distribution, PostgreSQL databases and the EXT3 file system
Each of these technologies has pre-built management hooks in them, said Soltero. Our goal was to be able to capture as much of that data by talking to the products and present it in a portal view.
Prior to adopting HQ, hi5 had been using a combination of Quest Software’s Big Brother and the Nagios open source monitoring project, but those tools lacked the historical perspective required to enable the company to trend performance, according to Hyperic.
Hi5 is doing in excess of 100,000 metric collections per minute. That technical feat is something to be proud of, but the real magic is how we present it and allow people to make something of that, said Soltero, noting that hi5 is typical of the Hyperic customer base. We want the next YouTube to grow up managing their technology using Hyperic.
