GroundBreaker News, November, 2006
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  1. Technology Insight by Craig Thomas »
  2. Featured Customer, UNC Charlotte »
  3. Recent News »

Congratulations!

Last Month's iPod nano Winners are:

» Steve Kelly, University of North Carolina Greensboro
» Brian Dichter, Township High School District 214

Visit us at LISA '06, booth #201, for your chance to win a 2GB iPod nano!

Hello!

This fall has been an exciting time here at GroundWork. With two months still remaining in Q4, we've already seen a banner growth year. Our subscription customer base has already increased over 100% from 2005, to more than 200 subscribers. Open source adopters are going beyond just bleeding edge technical companies. UNC at Charlotte (education), highlighted in this issue, is proof that open source IT operations management software is entering the mainstream.

In September we announced GroundWork Monitor 5, visit our website to learn what's new and to request a demo. Current GroundWork Monitor Professional or Small Business subscription customers can access the release through the GroundWork Support Center. With this release, we have a CentOS 4-bootable ISO available for download - you can run GroundWork Monitor Open Source without any installation. We also made our build process public to encourage builds for different distributions. We invite you to join the GroundWork Community and participate in our forums. We have over 1,100 members so far.

From now until the end of the year, you have the opportunity to win an iPod nano 2GB. All you need to do is tell us how we saved your tail at work. If your story is chosen, you'll win an iPod nano and your story will be published in the next GroundBreaker. Also, if you have a friend who could benefit from GroundWork Monitor, refer them to us. If they purchase GroundWork Monitor, you'll receive either a free seat in our training class or $1,000 off the renewal of your GroundWork Monitor subscription.

Over the past issues you've watched the transformation of The GroundBreaker. We're very excited about the new look of The GroundBreaker, and hope you are as well. Tell us how we're doing and let us know what you want to see in upcoming issues of The GroundBreaker. We appreciate your feedback and want to make our communications with you as valuable as possible. Send email to groundbreaker@groundworkopensource.com.

Sincerely,

Eden Hensley,
Director of Marketing Communications and The GroundBreaker Editor

GROUNDWORK Open Source, Inc.
139 Townsend Street, Suite 100
San Francisco, CA 94107-1946
www.groundworkopensource.com

 

Technology Insight by Craig Thomas:
Service Modeling Language -
Innovation Enabler or Roadkill on the IT Standards Highway

This month we introduce another new column to our newsletter. Each quarter, Craig Thomas, CTO and Chief Architect, will share his thoughts on a relevant technology trend. You can read Craig's bio on our website. This month Craig tackles Service Modeling Language, shedding insight on what SML is, why GroundWork cares, and what we're doing about it.

Last summer, mid-July to be specific, a team of vendors announced the start of public review for a new IT standard called Service Modeling Language (SML). But where did SML come from? What is SML made out of? What is it good for? Why would GroundWork care? What are we doing about it?

SML did not spring fully formed into the world. Microsoft, which is perhaps the strongest driver in the SML team, brought its work on System Definition Model (SDM) in as a starting point. SDM was first introduced in 2003 as the cornerstone to Microsoft's Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), a 10-year plan to create a comprehensive management platform for Windows. SML is essentially XML plus XML Schema 1.0 plus Schematron. Everyone knows what XML is, right? An XML Schema is a set of rules that define a valid XML document structure. SML extends XML Schema to support inter-document references and a set of constraints on those references. Schematron is an XML language for making assertions about the structure and content of an XML document. Finally, SML defines the process of model validation.

SML is of significant interest to GroundWork. After all, we're leveraging open source to disrupt the market space that has been dominated by BEA, BMC, CA, Cisco, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Sun. We can help the open source community leverage SML to continue its interoperability with the full spectrum of IT Management products.

Read the rest of Craig's Technology Insight; visit Technology Insights on our website.

 

Featured Customer: University of North Carolina at Charlotte

"GroundWork Monitor Professional provides complete visibility and monitoring of our IT infrastructure comparable to OpenView and Vantage. With GroundWork, the subscription and consulting services together cost us one-tenth the price of competing systems. With the assistance of the GroundWork professional services team, our IT staff set up complete monitoring capabilities for all of the university's servers, storage devices and networks in a matter of a few weeks."
    — Tom Lamb, CTO, UNCC

When Tom Lamb, CTO of University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC) was unable to see developing problems in his mixed and growing IT infrastructure, he and his colleagues decided to install a comprehensive IT infrastructure monitoring system. They decided on a phased approach. In the short term, they wanted the system to detect problems with the 137 servers hosting IT services and within the diverse 20 TB storage infrastructure. Over time, Lamb wanted to expand the monitoring system to every aspect of the IT environment.

These requirements pointed to purchasing an enterprise-class monitoring system. Lamb and his staff initially considered Hewlett-Packard OpenView and Compuware Vantage. However, says Lamb, the cost of purchasing, deploying and scaling either system was beyond the reach of the UNCC IT budget. Lamb decided to go with open source monitoring software and found that GroundWork Monitor Professional was the only system that had all the attributes the IT staff needed to watch over university-wide computing services. Read more. »

 

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