Sponsor Interview: Zenoss
Yes, we have still more sponsor goodness for you! This time around, we touched base with Zenoss, a company that offers a complete network monitoring and systems management platform that discovers networked IT resources, monitors them for performance and availability.
Q: How does your company work with the Linux/open source community? How does Linux and the community help your company?
Zenoss: Zenoss works with the open source community in a variety of ways. First we work with some of other projects that are complementary to our open source project like RRDTool. We are also a global sponsor of Software Freedom Day (www.softwarefreedomday.org) to help promote the use of open source software and try to participate in activites at Linux and open source advocacy events like SCALE, LinuxFestNW, USENIX LISA, and of course Ohio Linux Fest. Beyond that we try to be active in supporting Linux User Groups (LUGs).
Q: Does your company contribute to the Linux/open source community, and if so, how? (Obviously, in addition to supporting OLF.)
Zenoss: First and foremost is that we develop open source software and distribute it under the GNU GPL v2 (www.zenoss.com/download/). We also contribute financial support and when possible code to other projects, specifically we are a gold sponsor of the RRDTool and MRTG projects. We also provide financial support for other community organizations including being a sponsor of USENIX and SAGE, a sponsor of the annual Pycon Conference, and Software Freedom Day.
Q: How are your customers using Linux and open source?
Zenoss: Our customers are using Zenoss Core running on Linux to monitor and manage their applications, servers, and networks. We have some customers who are using Zenoss to monitor data centers and hosted environments while we have some who manage infrastructure for companies of all sizes. Some customers are using our synthetic transaction checking to make sure that their websites are working especially eCommerce.
We have the following examples from our open source community:
- An International Broadcasting Company is using Zenoss to monitor over 1000 devices in a site including their NetApp filers, Foundry switches, and a large number of servers. They are also sharing events data with their legacy monitoring solution since they have the freedom to access data through open standards - http://www.zenoss.com/community/zen-of-zenoss/success-stories/cbs.
- Todd Davis, a systems management professional for a CLEC consortium was formerly a Nagios user who needed additional functionality. He migrated to Zenoss Core to manage about 150 servers, swithces, PDUs and UPSs. - http://www.zenoss.com/community/zen-of-zenoss/success-stories/clec-consortium-replaces-nagios.
Some of our commercial customers are using Zenoss in the following ways:
Medifast is a publicly traded company that uses Zenoss to manage their entire infrastructure. One of the company's initiatives is to deploy IT systems to support Medifast grow the top line revenues from $80 million to $150 million per year. Medifast relies heavily on its web site to attract customers and generate revenues. Continued availability and high performance of the systems is key to the success of Medifast. Zenoss Appliance with Enterprise subscription was brought in and deployed within few hours. Medifast was immediately able to automatically discover its IT networks and components, including a few that were not previously documented. A model based CMDB was created and system monitors were deployed providing immediate value. Linux based Zenoss Appliance was used to monitor both Windows and Linux environments without the need to deploy agents.
Mercy was founded in 1874, as a non profit hospital to look after the sick and needy of Baltimore. It is now a large medical center with 2500 employees, $430 million in revenues while performing 1,200,000 minutes of surgery, 60,000 emergency room visits and 19,000 admitted patients staying average of 3 days per year. Mercy experienced explosive growth over the past five years and it has tripled investment in technology. Mercy IT had to scale and support over 200 unique applications running on approximately 200 servers with in high demand new technology solutions such as storage and bandwidth intensive digital x-ray solutions and transaction intensive electronic health records. Mercy had used manual and un-scalable processes to validate that the servers and applications were running properly by checking log files and monitoring disparate applications for performance metrics. Mercy selected Zenoss Enterprise subscription as its IT management solution with Inventory and Change Management, CMDB, Availability and Performance Monitoring and Events Management capabilities. Prior to deploying Zenoss Hardware Appliance, Mercy had experienced frequent production failures that caused downtime in production. Now, with Zenoss, Mercy IT has several different people running the Zenoss dashboard at the same time while they receive real time alerts.
Q: Why is Linux/FOSS an important technology for your company?
Zenoss: First, existing FOSS products (mainly libraries, app server, and database) and Linux give us a base to build our product on. Our product is extremely complex with roughly 700,000 lines of code. If we had to write a product from scratch we couldn't focus on the part of our software that provides the most value, network management. Additionally, we benefit from an FOSS development model because we get great feedback from our users who can see and enter tickets directly into our bug/feature tracking database (http://dev.zenoss.com/trac)
Q: Where do you see the Linux/FOSS market going in the next year?
Zenoss: The number of FOSS solutions is growing more quickly which is being fueled by having good open source building blocks (the same way MySQL, Python, Twisted, and RRDTool have helped us build Zenoss Core). We believe that along with that growth the quality of applications are also growing just as quickly. Examples that come to mind are Firefox, OpenOffice, and server software like Jboss. Ubuntu cutting a deal with Dell and having such a high quality desktop Linux OS is also another good example. When it comes to Linux we see it continue to grow but it's really been widely adopted already. What's more interesting is to see open source applications gain that same type of adoption in other IT segments. For example, it's encouraging to see SugarCRM growing in the customer relationship market (they have over 3 million downloads now) and products like Zimbra in messaging (they have well over 5 million users). Beyond that it's interesting to see more hardware companies adopt open source strategies such as Sun open sourcing their chips and AMD finally opening the ATI drivers for desktop Linux users. It's part of a trend of open source expanding it's reach well beyond the community of open source enthusiasts to people who once only used proprietary software. We think there will be exponential growth in open source users in general.
Q: How does supporting OLF fit into your company's strategy?
Zenoss is a community-driven software company. We benefit by collaborating with a large group of people who use our product on a daily basis. They give us feedback and request features that they need and generally appeal to other users. We benefit greatly by having the ability to interact face to face with Linux and open source users help raise our visibility and help us grow our open source community. That's why we believe supporting the OLF is such an important part of our company strategy.
You can find out more about the Zenoss Community at: http://www.zenoss.org.