The San Francisco, California-based company released its core software as open source in July 2005, and since then has seen a rapid rise in deployments and interest, according to CEO, Javier Soltero.
We have always been focused on the systems management space, he said. In July we open sourced it to get it in the hands of as many people as possible, he said of the Hyperic HQ management server.
With over 200 customers added to the company’s roster since then, and some 35,000 downloads, the company has now released version 3.0 of the open source version with a new operations dashboard, alerting, event analysis and corrective control enhancements.
According to Soltero, the key thing about 3.0 is that it is offers proactive management.
The idea behind this release is as we continue to see a number of alternatives, we see a number of solutions that are very reactive in nature, and are dumb, for want of a better term, he said.
Soltero explained that he was referring to simple red light/green light monitoring dashboards that take little account of application interdependencies.
Businesses are moving to fast moving applications, which escalates the problem of passive monitoring, he said.
We take a series of management functionality: monitoring, auto discovery, event management, control and alerting, and implement them in a way that is independent of one application to another.
According to Soltero, the approach is paying off as businesses increasingly adopt service oriented architecture and virtualization technologies that the existing systems management approaches are not capable of handling.
It’s the next-generation data center. This is about managing a growing type of data center, he said. From an open source perspective there isn’t an equivalent product out there.
While Hyperic HQ 3.0 Open Source is available now for free download, the company’s 3.0 Enterprise Extensions are currently in beta. The additional automation and control, policy-based alerting and automated problem detection capabilities are expected to be released late in the first quarter of this year.
As well as version 3.0, Hyperic also announced that it has been granted trading partner status for the US Federal Government, certifying that its software is suitable for government use, as well as a new partnership with open source stack provider SpikeSource Inc.
Redwood City, California-based SpikeSource plans to certify and sell Hyperic HQ as part of its SpikeIgnite platform open source software stacks, giving users the ability to monitor and manage SpikeIgnite components using the HQ software.
