Nemertes’ recent research on data centers has failed to find the management nirvana: The fully autonomic, adaptive, automatic, on-demand data center. Instead, IT executive participants in our research tell us they use a combination of free, open source and commercial tools to manage their data centers.

Even those companies that have bought entire management frameworks - such as CA Unicenter, HP OpenView or IBM Tivoli - often only use a small subset of the features. Even the big management platforms are used side by side with various free tools. Gradually, we are seeing more vendors bringing open source tools to the data center, backed by commercial support and fancy GUIs.

The top tools for managing data centers are often “ping” and “telnet.” Most companies still manage their infrastructure in silos, with separate management tools for the network, the servers and security devices. And the free tools that are introduced through the back door sometimes end up displacing the commercial tools that cost millions of dollars.

One of the research participants recounted how a very expensive installation of monitoring software was gradually replaced by MRTG, RRDTool and Cacti, three open source projects that use SNMP to generate historical graphs of network activity or other hardware metrics. First, an engineer installed the free software on a development server to monitor a few systems. As others discovered the software, they found it easier to use than the “official” monitoring tool and gradually migrated to the free software. Before long the main screen in the network operations center (NOC) was displaying the free tool and the “official” monitoring software was… officially discontinued.

One of the problems with using open source tools in the NOC or security operations center (SOC) environment has been the lack of commercial support. Patching, updating, configuring and maintaining these tools in production requires skills, and can be costly. But just like Red Hat brought “legitimacy” to Linux for commercial use (at least in the minds of those misinformed about open source), companies are springing up to bundle, polish and support what was formerly a mish-mash of open source monitoring and management tools.

The usual advantages to open source apply: easier to customize, often more modular and providing a “long tail” of support for obscure platforms and drivers. All of these attributes could mean the emergence of a very potent threat to traditional management behemoths.

If you are considering open source tools for your data center, it is worth examining the commercial options in this space. They offer the benefits of open source while ameliorating some of the weaknesses by providing packaging, maintenance, GUIs and technical support. In the mid-market and small business environment, the cost savings can be a significant motivator. But among larger enterprises open source management tools should be examined not for cost savings but also for the flexibility and customizability they may offer.