Every Friday we like to highlight some of our favorite posts on IT Operations, Cloud Computing, DevOps, Virtualization and anything else that grabbed our attention over the week. Here are some great articles from the week of May 7th that are worth taking a look at. Enjoy and have a fantastic weekend!

Study: Cloud Computing Cuts $5.5 Billion Annually from Federal Budget by Patrick Burke

The federal government saved nearly $5.5 billion a year by moving to cloud services. But it might have saved up to $12 billion if cloud strategies were more aggressive, a survey of federal IT managers found.

Citrix’s Project Avalon Delivers Windows via the Cloud by Mike Barton

Among the number of announcements under its “path to the cloud” banner at its Synergy show, Citrix Systems has launched Project Avalon, which it says “enables enterprises to transform some of their most important workloads, Windows desktop and Windows applications, to run on cloud infrastructure.”

Lessons from Citrix Synergy: OpenStack vs. CloudStack  by Floyd Strimling

This past week I had the privilege of attending Citrix Synergy 2012 in San Francisco California.  My intent was to explore Citrix’s strategy of mobile and cloud-based solutions while presenting the case for cloud monitoring at CloudStack’s Build a Cloud Day.  This was my first Synergy, and while I had relatively low expectations, I was excited by Citrix’s vision, solutions, and roadmap.

Red Hat Reveals Plans for Hybrid Enterprise PaaS With OpenShift by Chris Preimesberger

Open-source enterprise software provider Red Hat on May 9 revealed a strategy for offering its OpenShift platform as a service (PaaS) cloud operating system, which is aimed at becoming an alternative to current industry market-share leaders, such as VMware’s vSphere, Microsoft Azure and NASA/Rackspace’s OpenStack.

If a tree falls in your network, does anybody hear? by Kevin Nikkhoo

If you claim that the cloud is too risky, then one also must equally consider that adequate security of an existing on-premise  network, or lack thereof, could also be a root cause. If lack of compliance is the issue, then do some more homework…compliance in the cloud is real.

Open-source cloud frameworks: A work in progress by Robert L. Scheier

When IT consultancy OpenCredo set out to launch three new applications within seven months for a major insurance underwriter, it had three goals in mind: Trim development time from the usual years-long pace, allow for frequent changes from the client, and build a system that can handle unpredictable traffic spikes.

Going native: The move to bare-metal cloud services by David Linthicum

Removing the virtualization layer provides access to the power and performance that many cloud computing consumers seek.

Defining ‘big data’ depends on who’s doing the defining by Brandon Butler

Big data is an IT buzzword nowadays, but what does it really mean? When does data become big? At a recent Big Data and High Performance Computing Summit in Boston hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS), data scientist John Rauser mentioned a simple definition: Any amount of data that’s too big to be handled by one computer.

HP opens up public cloud to public beta by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As El Reg told you it would a month ago, Hewlett-Packard today has opened up its HP Cloud Services public cloud – aka HP Cloud because by definition a cloud is a service, right? – for a full-on beta onslaught from John Q Public.

Piston Cloud, the Red Hat of OpenStack Cloud Computing? by Libby Clark

With the recent buzz around the OpenStack project, momentum behind open source cloud development is building. We’re now seeing an early ecosystem of companies and products built around OpenStack – a goal that Rackspace’s Lew Moorman laid out for the project when it launched two years ago.

Amazon and SAP put All-in-One in the cloud by Barb Darrow

SAP All-in-One applications will soon run in Amazon’s cloud. That could make Amazon EC2 more attractive to companies that worry about offloading crucial business applications from their own data centers.  SAP BusinessObjects analytics and Rapid Deployment solutions already run on Amazon — as do most of Oracle’s business applications.

This just in: Cloud computing is hard and takes a long time by David Linthicum

Cisco Systems has surveyed more than 1,300 IT professionals to determine the top priorities and challenges they face when migrating applications and information to the cloud. Guess what? It’s harder, and it takes longer than many thought.

A few more worth a look…

• 6 Signs of a Maturing Cloud-Computing Industry by Todd Nielsen
• Top 50 Open Source Companies: Where Are They Now? by The VAR Guy
• Four Reasons Why I Hate the Term ‘Cloud’ by Chris Dotson
• Google puts a price tag on Cloud SQL services by Barb Darrow
• Cloud data fiasco forces bosses to break out the whiteboards by Gavin Clarke
• Amazon announces cloud expo this November in Las Vegas by Rachel King

This past week, I had the privilege of attending Citrix Synergy 2012 in San Francisco, California.  My intent was to explore Citrix’s strategy of mobile and cloud-based solutions while presenting the case for cloud monitoring at CloudStack’s Build a Cloud Day.  This was my first Synergy, and while I had relatively low expectations, I was excited by Citrix’s vision, solutions, and roadmap.

Synergy cleared-up one of my biggest questions for CloudStack; what is the commercial strategy?  Mark Templeton, Citrix CEO, wasted no time in Wednesday’s keynote to announce Citrix CloudPlatform powered by Apache CloudStack.  Clearly Citrix has learned from their past dealings within open source, and they are now orchestrating, pun intended, a masterful open source and commercial strategy.

Inevitably, each time I discussed CloudStack, the topic of OpenStack reared its head.  It’s simply impossible to escape the hype of OpenStack powered by some of the largest entities in the world; namely, Rackspace, NASA, Dell, HP, IBM, Red Hat, and more.   However, OpenStack and their commercializers should take note of what’s going on at Citrix.

While OpenStack is a wonderful collection of projects (no one can deny the greatness of Swift), it also has a wide range of maturity concerns.  In fact, many conversations centered on the reported development efforts at both Rackspace and HP needed to get OpenStack into production.  Large service providers and cloud providers may have the resources needed to develop, maintain, and extend an OpenStack deployment, but what about the rest of us? Most worrisome may be the notion of OpenStack fragmentation or forks that are necessary for these providers to differentiate themselves from each other. Furthermore, the confusion around what OpenStack is and what it does was palpable.

Meanwhile, CloudStack, by its very nature, is a bit more mature than OpenStack.  Look no further than customers like Edmunds, Datapipe, and Zynga to legitimize this claim. These are real customers generating real revenue or other benefits using CloudStack in deployment.  Additionally, within the last month or so, CloudStack is building an impressive ASF ecosystem.

In the end, it will come down to the OpenStack Foundation vs. Apache Software Foundation and OpenStack’s Commercializers vs. Citrix.  From the friendly confines of the open source world, OpenStack and CloudStack certainly will be able to get-a-long and collaborate.  However, the same cannot be said about Citrix who will need to aggressively market and defend CloudPlatform against OpenStack powered deployments.

OpenStack has done a wonderful job of promoting themselves as the most important open source project of our generation.  On the other hand, Citrix is in an enviable position of a cohesive commercial solution and strategy that is in place and available today.

Although Citrix is careful not to engage in a war with OpenStack, clearly these two projects are vying for the same market and customers.  Tell me what you think. Who’s your money on?  Can two survive?  I’ll tell you if you tell me!

Zenoss is at Citrix Synergy this week in San Francisco. In conjunction with our presence at the event and session during the Build a Cloud Workshop, we’re happy to announce an update to our CloudStack monitoring ZenPack.

Available immediately on GitHub as part of our Open Source ZenPack portfolio, these enhancements will extend monitoring and correlation capabilities to VMs running on CloudStack for a more unified view of the CloudStack infrastructure. More specifically, the new CloudStack ZenPack now monitors a broader range of VM’s, including router VMs, secondary storage VMs and console proxy VMs, to ensure service performance on CloudStack.

While at Citrix Synergy this week, stop by booth #906 in the CloudStack Community Pavilion to learn more about the CloudStack ZenPack. And on Thursday, we’ll be presenting at the Build a Cloud workshop, which is a great opportunity to learn best practices and gain industry insights into building elastic, scalable and profitable open source clouds.

We originally launched this ZenPack last fall and with good reason. Citrix has been doing great things to promote open source and interoperable Cloud computing. As evidence by their activity within the OpenStack community (even before entrusting CloudStack’s future to the Apache Foundation), Citrix is moving in the right direction by letting CloudStack live as a full open source project. Not to mention that they are the first Cloud platform in the industry to do so.

Our own Floyd Strimling has pointed out, Citrix has maintained a truly heterogeneous offering supporting the likes of VMware, Microsoft, Xen, and more.  Additionally, Citrix has maintained an aggressive roadmap while releasing stable and mature code to both their community and commercial customers.

According to Chet Luther, Principal Engineer and Architect of the CloudStack ZenPack, Citrix makes their CloudStack mission clear: deliver a powerful, proven, hypervisor-agnostic platform that helps customers of all sizes build robust Clouds. Zenoss aims to support this mission by working with our commercial and open source customers to continue enhancing our CloudStack ZenPack and providing a powerful unified monitoring solution for CloudStack deployments.

Having recently perused a few trade shows and viewed lots of industry resources, there’s a lot of discussion around analytics. Looking at some IT Operations system demos, there are quite a few slick interfaces with some eye-popping reports. Really, it would seem from viewing these that an IT Ops professional could produce advanced reports for just about anything they’d need. Yet many of these systems store all of this data, and do all of the transformations and queries, without a separate data warehouse? So, why would anyone require a data warehouse, for IT Operations?

IT Operations has grown to a level of maturity, that analytics are becoming the norm. But I won’t go onto detail on that, as I’ve recently written an analytics blog post that covers it. What I do want to explore is why one would want to do those analytics on a data warehouse vs. the transactional system. For the record, Zenoss Service Dynamics does incorporate an IT Operations Data Warehouse. With that in mind, Data Warehouses make sense, for the following reasons:

1. Scalability – Offload server & I/O bound tasks associated with querying and reporting on servers & I/O not used by the transaction processing systems. In other words, let your IT Ops monitoring system do its job, without getting bogged down by resource-intensive analytics stuff.
2. Performance – Data models that are ideal for querying and reporting are not appropriate for transaction processing. By splitting this function, you get faster individual analytics & transaction systems, vs. a slow generic system that covers both functions.
3. More Data – To store data from a longer span of time than can efficiently be held in a transaction processing system. How long should IT Ops transactional systems store their data, especially if they’re doing real or near real time polling? The reality is, without a data warehouse, most IT Ops monitoring systems must purge this data regularly, for performance reasons.
4. Standardization – To provide a repository of normalized transaction data that can be reported against, without modifying the transaction processing systems

There are certainly other primers, but these may be the ones that are most significant for IT Operations. Numbers 1-3 are significant for any IT Ops system that attempts to perform analytics in their transactional systems. By adding the analytics overhead to their transactional systems, they’ll adversely impact performance and their ability to scale. And, too be effective, they’ll really have to limit the data stored. So, what’s the point? If we look at the industry now, we have a couple approaches to dealing with lots of data:

• No Data Warehouse – These vendors crunch their snazzy reports and analytics, on the transactional systems. This impacts scale and performance heavily, and will lead to organizations having to choose between effective monitoring, and good analytics. Really, it’s a dead-end game. As analytics requirements grow (eg. capacity planning, tracking SLAs, etc.), they will eventually need a warehouse. But organizations will be so invested in customized reports & such for these systems that the transition will be extremely painful.
• 3rd Party IT Ops Data Warehouse – Whether by buying one off the shelf, or by building their own, organizations can bolt a 3rd party warehouse on their IT Ops system. The standardization & normalization of data (eg. ETL) for these implementations is usually painful, and they’re hard to maintain. Though some “frameworks” promote these integrated capabilities, they are really 3rd party solutions that have been bolted on, through acquisition.

Some still see an IT Ops data warehouse as overkill, but I personally see it as overdue. It frees up the transactional side of the platform to scale to just about any infrastructure, while allowing the analytics side to do what it does best. As organizations stretch their transactional systems to deliver advanced reporting and even rudimentary analytics, they’ll eventually run into walls requiring them to bolt on a warehouse, anyhow.

Like it or not, analytics is coming to IT Ops, and it will inevitably drag its warehouse along for the ride.

Every Friday we like to highlight some of our favorite posts on IT Operations, Cloud Computing, DevOps, Virtualization and anything else that grabbed our attention over the week. Here are some great articles from the week of April 30th that are worth taking a look at. Enjoy and have a fantastic weekend!

Cloud & the evolution of the enterprise architect by James Urquhart

Enterprise architects have been a staple of corporate IT departments for well over a decade now, starting in earnest with the advent of service-oriented architecture and corporate data modeling. The need for enterprise architecture was spurred by the need to gain control over an increasingly complex computing environment, and an increasingly large backlog of data and feature needs. But those needs are changing, and so is the job of the enterprise architect.

To win with cloud computing, change IT first by David Linthicum

Most organizations consider the move to cloud-based platforms as simple additions to the existing portfolio of IT systems. However, if internal IT does not change around the usage of most cloud services, enterprise IT won’t get the full benefits. Indeed, many initial uses of cloud computing resources in such organizations will end up in failure. The dirty little secret is that most of the change to IT needs to occur before the first implementation to make cloud computing holistically successful.

Devops Culture (Part 1) by John Willis

After the first US based Devopsdays in Mountainview 2010 Damon Edwards (@damonedwards) and I coined the acronym CAMS, which stands for Culture, Automation, Measurement and Sharing. Jez Humble (@jezhumble) later added an L, standing for Lean, to form CALMS. In this post I wanted to start with an introduction and overview of what culture might look like in the DevOps movement and identify some patterns.

VMware, Piston Cloud pledge to develop open source PaaS offering by Brandon Butler

Deal allows integration of Open Stack with Cloud Foundry to create IaaS cloud deployment model aimed at enterprise users. In a pairing of unlikely partners, Piston Cloud Computing announced it will work to support integration of VMware’s open source platform-as-a-service offering Cloud Foundry with OpenStack, the open source infrastructure-as-a-service model. In a pairing of unlikely partners, Piston Cloud Computing announced it will work to support integration of VMware’s open source platform-as-a-service offering Cloud Foundry with OpenStack, the open source infrastructure-as-a-service model.

Devs vs. Ops: Sushi vs. Meat and Potatoes by Klint Finley

One of the criticism of DevOps we hear often is that it’s too focused on getting operations to change according to what developers want than getting developers to adjust to the realities that constrain operations. For example, Circonus CEO Theo Schlossangle made this point on theCube earlier this year.

Amazon EC2 – a real-world case study of moving from a data center to the cloud by Greg Wilson

Most people exploring Amazon EC2 ask the same question I asked… “What is this really going to cost me?”. When you dig into how EC2 is priced, you’ll find that there are multiple variables, which creates a bit of uncertainty. Basically, it boils down to the server instance type, the disk space used, and the amount of data moved in and out of the instance. There are other small charges for number of I/Os and any unused IP addresses, but these are typically only a few cents and don’t have much impact on the final bill (based on my experience).

Zynga Takes On Amazon In IaaS Game by Charles Babcock

Zynga will sell cloud infrastructure-as-a-service to other game makers who want a hosting platform. With this innovative play, Zynga just became Amazon’s competitor.

IBM PureApplication Systems: It Is Not PaaS. Period. by Krishnan Subramanian

IBM Impact has been going on at Las Vegas and the buzz around the event is IBM PureSystems. I see a lot of excitement around PureSystems both from IBM side and their customer side. However, I also see some confusion around the messaging. IBM has been sending ambiguous signals around IBM PureApplication Systems which is part of the IBM PureSystem family.

Red Hat releases OpenShift source code by Sophie Curtis

Open source software distributor Red Hat has released the source code for its OpenShift platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering, allowing developers to run the platform on multiple cloud fabrics, including OpenStack.

IBM’s SugarCRM Deal Is Sweet for Open Source Software by Clint Boulton

IBM’s recent decision to replace its Oracle Siebel customer management system with SugarCRM’s web-based application is a big vote of confidence in commercial open source software.

Piston to Integrate Cloud Foundry & OpenStack by Maureen O’Gara

Clouds evidently make for strange bedfellows. Piston Cloud Computing, the start-up peddling an OpenStack distribution for enterprise private clouds, is co-operating with VMware of all people to develop a Cloud Provider Interface (CPI) that integrates OpenStack cloud infrastructure with Cloud Foundry, VMware’s open source Platform-as-a-Service.

The Fundamental Elements Of Cloud Computing Security by the Cloud Business Review Team

Cloud computing is the hot topic in the IT industry at the moment, but it is recognised that many businesses are cautious about migrating services to the cloud due to concerns over security.

A few more noteworthy posts…

• Why the new Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud Starter Edition is good news for Partners by Bill Petro
• VMware to offer enterprise application portal for BYOD by Joab Jackson
• Dexter vs Big Data by Josh Atwell
• Facebook’s Mystery Hardware Maker Lands on U.S. Shores by Cade Metz

This week, Zenoss will be sponsoring Citrix Synergy 2012 in San Francisco. Not only that, we’re leading a session at the free How to Build a Cloud Day. If you’re going to be at the show or in town, it’s a great opportunity to learn from industry experts.

Join us for free day of learning, best practices and industry insights into building elastic, scalable and profitable open source clouds. The Build a Cloud Day is a one-day event held in conjunction with Citrix Synergy 2012 in San Francisco and includes a free pass to the Synergy Keynote and Solutions Expo. This event offers a unique opportunity to learn about the cloud building as well as the challenges and successes of delivering cloud services.

• Learn how to build an open source cloud with solutions from Citrix CloudStack, Canonical, RightScale, Zenoss and Xen.org.
• Network with peers, industry experts and solution providers at the CloudStack Community Reception
• Watch the Citrix Synergy keynote where Mark Templeton, president and CEO of Citrix, and Sameer Dholakia, General Manager, will discuss Citrix’s cloud strategy and Citrix’s participation in the Apache Software Foundation.
• Eat lunch and visit the Synergy Solutions Expo and the CloudStack Community Pavilion

So what are you waiting for? Hit up the link below to RSVP and get the rest of the details.

Build a Cloud Day at Citrix Synergy, San Francisco

My grandmother passed away over a month ago, and out of nostalgia (and also because my automatic drip coffeemaker made weak, lukewarm coffee, and I cracked yet another French press), I bought a stainless steel Farberware percolator. Grandma liked her coffee “H-O-T, hot,” and so do I.

For my taste, my first brewed pot was excellent. I followed Grandma’s rule of keeping the stovetop percolator on low-to-medium heat and eyeballing the clear knob for the right color in between reading Mad Men recaps on Instapaper. The resulting brew was hot enough to burn my tongue and made my cheap coffee taste full-flavored – certainly no more bitter than Starbuck’s. And it smelled like Grandma’s last apartment, minus the brisket.

So what is the connection between these competing brewing methods and the #monitoringsucks meme? I recently spoke with Knewton’s Dave Zwieback, the main subject of my last post, Seeking Out the IT Generalists in the Sea of DevOps, and he said that most of today’s monitoring tools supply a “daily drip of data” that fail to provide a coherent and repeatable means of correlating that data.

“Unless you’re in active troubleshooting mode, you’re just not putting it together,” Zwieback says.

The monitoring solutions generate so many alerts based on scripts you’ve set up on, say, Nagios that it becomes overwhelming. Each drip of data seems to hold the same importance as any other drip, leaving you with a weak solution that can scorch you if you leave that data in the pot too long.

Cloud only complicates the situation. In the old rack-em, stack-em days, IT people could monitor each physical server for aberrant processes and respond to those problems. If something went wrong, you could patch or replace the software on a given server or remove the offending server and install the same software on a replacement box.

But in a cloud server environment, “the notion of persistence goes out the window,” Zwieback says.

Zwieback explains:

In a cloud environment, like Joyent or AWS, you may have 10 web servers that we’ll call System A1-to-A10. At some point you want to install a new version of software, so you load them on servers B1-to-B10. So for a short time you have 20 servers running, and then you kill all the old instances. So you still end up with 10 servers, but they’re not considered the same 10 servers to most [current monitoring systems].

Or in your A1-A10 scenario, A5 fails, and it’s replaced with A11. There are thousands of instances like this in the cloud. The cloud model has instances going away all the time, which causes problems for monitoring systems. It’s not like having 10 systems spinning up and down.

So it’s no surprise that #monitoringsucks is percolating as a movement and that DevOps people are spearheading this push.

Every Friday we like to highlight some of our favorite posts on IT Operations, Cloud Computing, DevOps, Virtualization and anything else that grabbed our attention over the week. Here are some great articles from the week of April 22nd that are worth taking a look at. Enjoy and have a fantastic weekend!

Linux Foundation Backs ‘Open Cloud’ With CloudOpen by Mike Barton

As the heavyweights of the IT industry swarm on the OpenStack cloud OS and the OpenFlow networking protocol, there’s a renewed push to avoid vendor lock-in and to also keep the cloud innovative, and the giants of open source software are stepping up their efforts.

Zynga infrastructure CTO: Making hardware cool again by Brandon Butler

Allan Leinwand is an infrastructure guy. He’s CTO for infrastructure at Zynga, which during the past few years has built the zCloud, which powers some of the most popular social games today, such as “FarmVille” and “Words with Friends.” It works by combining the capacity of Amazon Web Service’s public cloud with the company’s custom-built private cloud.

Cloud Computing is Evolving – How to Follow the Trends and Make Better Cloud Adoption Decisions by Ivan Widjaya

The world of cloud computing is evolving rapidly. Businesses want to adopt the cloud should spend more time learning the basics before they plunge themselves into the cloud, for some obvious reasons. One of the major reasons: The cloud is not “the ultimate” solution for business.

IBM’s Buying Vivisimo for Its Big Data Push by Maureen O’Gara

In the name of its Hadoop-based Big Data platform, IBM is buying Carnegie Mellon spin-off and enterprise search house Vivisimo on undisclosed terms.

Forrester: Hire software developers who take part in open source projects by Anh Nguyen

Analyst firm Forrester has encouraged businesses to recruit software developers who take part in open source projects, as it shows they are keeping their skills current.

Gartner Report: Five Trends in Cloud Computing that will Impact Your Technology Strategy by Gartner & CloudTimes

Although the potential of cloud computing is impressive, the scope and depth of impact and the level of acceptance over time are uncertain and require frequent revisions of the strategy being taken by the company in each case.

The day my mind became open sourced  by Phil Shapiro

I can remember so clearly the exact day my mind became open sourced. It was a crisp and sunny November day in 1973. After class in middle school, I called up my best friend, Bruce Jordan, and asked, “Can I come over to play now?” Bruce replied, “Sure.” I jumped on my red, one-speed Schwinn bicycle and biked like mad the two miles over to Bruce’s house. I arrived happily breathless.

Is That Cloud Really Clean? by Ron Schenone

The cloud — the ultimate solution to computer storage capacity — is becoming more and more a factor of life, but is there a day coming when it, too, will not hold enough data to satisfy the ever-growing needs of our technological society? That could be the case if one looks at the past decade or so…

CIOs get no respect in Gartner CEO survey. So what? Follow the money by Linda Tucci

For those who haven’t seen the recent Gartner CEO survey, CIOs come across in it as the Rodney Dangerfields of the C-suite. Not a person ever likely to occupy a CEO position, in the eyes of the CEO. Not the person CEOs see as leading their company’s “innovation management program.” Fewer than one in 200 CIOs are considered top executive material by their CEO.

OpenStack Optimism Overrides Confusion by Alexander Haislip

OpenStack isn’t easy to understand. It’s a combination of five major projects, each handling a different piece of cloud computing. HP and IBM say it’s the future, and Rackspace says it’s putting $4 million to $5 million to work on the project each year. VMWare CEO Paul Maritz says it’s immature. Even the attendees at the OpenStack conference in San Francisco last week seem confused.

Oracle And OpenStack: A Tale Of Two Completely Opposite Strategies by James Staten

If you wanted to see the full spectrum of cloud choices that are coming to market today you only have to look at these two efforts…OpenStack is clearly an effort by a vendor (Rackspace) to launch a community to help advance technology and drive innovation around a framework that multiple vendors can use to bring myriad cloud services to market and deliver differentiated values. Whereas Oracle…is taking a completely closed and self-built approach that looks to fulfill all cloud values from top to bottom.

CIOs’ Cloud Strategy Must Include Public Cloud Services by Bernard Golden

For all the apprehension they may bring, public clouds demand a position in the enterprise IT strategy. CIO.com columnist Bernard Golden explains how CIOs and business leaders can make their peace with the public cloud, and how it’s not incompatible with the much-revered private cloud.

A few more noteworthy articles…

• Five Advantages of Virtual Storage Appliances (VSAs) by Nicos Vekiarides
• New Survey Reveals Large Amount of Organizations Are Using Open Source Tools by Kris Holt
• Going all in: How to run a company on 21 apps in the cloud by Scott Gassmann
• Why we should switch to Cloud Hosting by Sharon Carr
• Google Drive crashes into China’s Great Firewall by Steven Musil
• Google’s Drive Adds to a Complicated Cloud by Tom Simonite

We are bringing back the Zenoss Deep Dives.  Zenoss Deep Dives are freely available to anyone, whether you are interested in Zenoss Service Dynamics (commercial) or Zenoss Core (community), and will be provided via webinars, Google+, Twitter, and more.  Our goal is to educate our current and future customers on various aspects of the Zenoss solution while continuing to promote a culture of sharing.

For our first technology session, we’ve selected a topic that has always garnered interest, namely how to manage your event console.  It doesn’t matter if you have 100 or 20,000 devices; the event console is the heart and soul of your Zenoss solution and requires some tender love and care.  To facilitate this TLC, Zenoss provides a wealth of methods and strategies to manage your event console.  From event classes and transforms, you are in full control of your event console.

Additionally, we will be discussing advanced technology available within our Zenoss Service Dynamics Impact solution.  This will include comparing rules based correlations and transforms vs. contextual polices and impact gates.  This new technology dramatically simplifies traditional event consoles by providing a service centric view of your IT infrastructure.

Whether you are new to Zenoss or a seasoned expert, you’ll find this to be a fascinating discussion led by one of Zenoss’ Principal Engineers.  As always, we’ll leave plenty of time for questions and answers and we will look to continue the dialog after the webinar; look for details on this to be provided on the webinar!

Again, this Zenoss Deep Dive will be a technical discussion focused on:

• Techniques to maintain a clean event console
• Event Transforms (Rules Based)
• Impact Policies (Contextual Based)

Finally, we want to hear from you on what technical and/or non-technical topics you would like to discuss next.  In the past, we’ve had requests for additional information on templates and specific ZenPacks.  What’s on your mind?  What issues are you and your companies facing?  Do you want to share any success stories?

Please feel free to email us with your thoughts, questions, and/or concerns at deepdive@zenoss.com.

Until then, we look to see you Thursday at this week’s first Zenoss Deep Dive Technical Event: Managing Your Event Console.

Every Friday we like to highlight some of our favorite posts on IT Operations, Cloud Computing, DevOps, Virtualization and anything else that grabbed our attention over the week. Here are some great articles from the week of April 15th that are worth taking a look at. Enjoy and have a fantastic weekend!

Why Open Source Is the Key to Cloud Innovation by Thor Olavsrud

In the 25 years since Richard Stallman wrote the GNU General Public License, free and open source software (FOSS) have become pervasive in computing: Linux, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL and more can be found in large numbers of enterprises across the globe. And open source is now increasingly undergirding cloud computing as well.

Puppet Labs Announces OpenStack Support by Klint Finley

Today at OpenStack Summit, Puppet Labs announced a set of modules for deploying and maintaining the open source private cloud system OpenStack. The free modules will work with both the free version of Puppet and with Puppet Enterprise. Puppet already supports Amazon Web Services and VMware, so an open source alternative is a welcome addition.

Cloud infrastructures ‘an asteroid belt’ to navigate by Chris Mayer

It’s an exciting time to be in IT in general as we are seeing breakthroughs across the board.  From solid state drives to falling price of memory to powerful compute platforms, to new network paradigms, it’s simply an amazing time. Within “Cloud” specifically, the pace of innovation and competition is driving a revolution that is breaking down traditional silos while offering unprecedented agility that enables both traditional and nontraditional business models to thrive.

Splunk’s IPO Price Raised After Stellar Growth Year by Mellisa Tolentino

Splunk, the company that specializes in big data analysis, announced the pricing of their initial public offering of 13,500,000 shares of common stock at a price to the public of $17.00 per share.  A total of 12,507,278 shares are being offered by Splunk while a total of 992,722 shares are being offered by selling stockholders.

The Origins of Splunk by Klint Finley

Today “operational intelligence” vendor Splunk officially announced its IPO. In a video interview with Dell’s Barton George, Splunk CTO and co-founder Erik Swan explains the origins of the company and how it went from being a complicated dashboard product to being the “Google of machine data.”

Just how big is the Amazon cloud anyway? by Barb Darrow

Everyone knows Amazon’s cloud is huge. But many want to know exactly how huge it is. The latest to try is Deepfield Networks, a stealthy startup that worked with unnamed “network provider research” partners to figure out how much Internet traffic flows into and out of Amazon’s cloud. It found that 1/3 of all Internet users hit Amazon-based services at least once a day and that 1 percent of all web consumer traffic is moving either into or out of Amazon’s cloud.

Cisco Outlines an SDN Plan by Craig Matsumoto

Cisco Systems Inc. has confirmed that Insieme…is working on software-defined networking (SDN) and that the project is, indeed, another spin-in from former Cisco executives. CEO John Chambers confirmed Insieme’s existence and purpose during a press roundtable at a Cisco partner event Tuesday, Network World reported. The investment in Insieme is US$100 million so far and will max out at $750 million.

Sizzling open vs. proprietary debate heats up the cloud by Brandon Butler

Vendor rhetoric hot and heavy; Amazon Web Services still could have last laugh. It’s turning into a mud-slinging affair in the cloud computing industry. It’s turning into a mud-slinging affair in the cloud computing industry.

Rackspace Launches Next Generation Cloud Services to Support OpenStack Cloud Deployments by CloudTimes

Rackspace Hosting, one of the contenders in the fight to take on Amazon Web Services division and Citrix as the dominant public cloud provider and a co-founder of OpenStack, announced the launch of world’s first large scale next generation cloud based products powered by OpenStack technology. The new offerings feature enhanced cloud solutions such as Cloud Database, Cloud Servers, Cloud Network, Cloud Block Storage, Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Panel and OpenStack API.

Cloud Computing Certification And Future Job Opportunities by Humayun

Cloud computing has a lot in store in terms of future job creation. It is anticipated that cloud computing will lead to a generation of an estimated 14 million novel job opportunities across the world in the span of the coming three years. Surprising enough, the scope of the fresh jobs may extend beyond the IT sector.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux plus IBM Hardware equals Performance Computing by Ken Hess

Red Hat, Inc. is the clear leader in the Linux market. It has the strongest, commercially supported Linux distribution and the best-performing virtualization solution for servers and desktops. It is the first billion dollar open source company in the world and is the most successful Linux company thanks in part to its dedication to the open source community and free software. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), its flagship Linux product, is the one to watch in the data center for enterprise-level workloads including databases, application delivery and virtualization.

Oracle Quietly Plotting Ambitious Cloud Computing Plan by Brandon Butler

During a series of analyst briefings this week, Oracle has provided additional details of how it plans to play in the cloud moving forward. The overall strategy is an ambitious one that features software (SaaS) and platform (PaaS) offerings, along with social collaboration tools, all leveraging the legacy database management systems that have made Oracle one of the biggest tech companies in the world.

A few more noteworthy posts…

• How Cloud Computing is Saving the Earth [Infographic] by Angela Bartels
• VMware Profit Shoots Up 25 Percent in Q1 Report – Virtualization by Chris Prelmesberger
• The Cloud Wars – Private Vs Public [Infographic] by CloudTweaks
• Open Source Private Cloud Software Startup Eucalyptus Raises $30M From IVP, Benchmark To Take On VMware by Leena Rao