The groundswell of open-source technologies entering today's networks has in many ways forced traditional network management platforms to play catch-up to the open-source community.
So instead of pursuing control of open-source components by following the strategies of traditional device management platforms, why not begin with a management platform designed for the components of a network's open-source and Web infrastructure, then simply bring established device management technology into the fold?
This is the vision of Hyperic, a San Francisco-based spin-off of Covalent Technologies.
"I think [IBM] Tivoli, [Hewlett-Packard] OpenView, [BMC] Patrol"those products are old, expensive and they are not suited for Web infrastructure," said Hyperic President Mark Douglas. "They are more suited for device management, and we think there are holes in them and that's what we are going after."
Hyperic's HQ 1.2 management platform puts both open-source and proprietary Web applications and infrastructure first, while still being able to easily support vital commercial platforms and products such as Oracle, Windows, Sun ONE, BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere and others, Douglas said.
The Hyperic advantage is simple, he said. "Tivoli, OpenView, BCM--they support Web applications, but their real competency is network devices. We focus primarily on Web applications while supporting network devices, so in a way we took on the hard part first," Douglas said.
Open-source technologies including Linux, Apache, Tomcat, MySQL and JBoss are all easily managed with HQ 1.2, as well as all other points of the IT stack including servers, commercial applications, Web services and other popular platforms. "We have equal support for both commercial and open-source technologies," he said.
Advances in open-source management made by Tivoli, OpenView and BMC's recently Linux-fortified Patrol offerings, may enable management at the Web infrastructure level, but what they lack there is Hyperic's level of customization, said Douglas. And Hyperic's ease of customization is exactly what's driving the current reseller channel for HQ 1.2, a development channel made up mostly of ISVs.
"One advantage we have is our solution is very customizable--it can be tailored--and that's a key thing for ISV partners," Douglas said.
Hyperic's plug-in architecture and strong API set make HQ 1.2 "a management platform you can use out of the box, or if you are an ISV you can customize it," he said. Hyperic's HQ 1.2 offers critical management tools such as auto-discovery of all platforms, servers and services within a network. Advanced network monitoring of inventory and transaction performance comes standard with HQ 1.2. Policy-based alerts can be programmed to notify administrators before a network problem reaches the critical stage, and corrective action can even be automated in some cases, eliminating the need for an administrator to intervene, Douglas said.
Pete Jenney, product manager at Ipswitch, an ISV in Lexington, Mass., agrees there is a fundamental difference when it comes to device management vs. application infrastructure management.
"Web is an application infrastructure, device is different," he said. But based on that difference, and the motivation of many to adopt open-source as a way of saving money, Jenney said he believes that HQ 1.2 "is aimed at an area where people aren't willing to spend a lot of money."
Douglas disagrees. "We are not cheap," he said of the price of Hyperic HQ 1.2. "We're $65 per month, per machine."
