The Power and Roi of Open Source

The open source symposium was held at Tajoptimizing and increasing utilization of computing
Residency, Bangalore on 17th and 18th October,systems. They declined to comment about the
2006. The event was conducted by Red Hat,licensing of the operating system. They can charge
sponsored by AMD and the research data was basedper operating system (if 3 operating system
on IDC's research and surveys. The speakers talkedinstances are run on one machine, they can charge
about the trends in the industry, the business andfor 3 licenses) or per hardware (this is independent
revenue model of Red Hat, how open source can beof how many operating system you have installed in
applied to architecture, software, middleware anda pc).
hardware.Red Hat's acquisition of JBoss:
Right now the open source developer participationThis move is strategically poised to improve the
from APAC region and India in specific is miniscule.presence of Red Hat in the middleware. They
They spread some awareness about Red Hat openwanted to deliver a full server application stack. JBoss
source platform and threw some light on how toprovides a very rich set of applications, J2EE server,
participate in the open source community and howportal, development IDE, transaction management
we all can benefit from this model.etc. This gives Red Hat a middleware stack that
According to IDC's recent research, enterprisebeats their competition by thousands of dollars. JBoss
adoption of open source has grown manifold;makes more sense here and it will become their de
companies worldwide are increasing investment infacto application server. They will be able to do some
open source technologies. Today enterprises havereally tight integration and give their customers an
started benefiting from the quality, license costout-of-the-box J2EE solution that should perform
savings and flexibility of open source. Beyond profitreally well. It is still not known whether JBoss will be
margin of open source adoption, there was alsobundled with Red Hat as of now.
discussion about backing open standards,SystemTap
contributions for open source community.SystemTap, a Red Hat utility allows developers and
Some of the interesting topics are given in detailadministrators to write scripts for deep examinations
below:of Dynamic Linux Kernel activities. Data may be
The Power of Choice: Open Source Architecturefiltered, extracted, and summarized quickly to enable
The long term vision of Open Source Architecture isdiagnoses of complex problems.
built on open standards and interoperability. The OpenJBoss Operations Network (JBoss ON)
Source architecture delivers a suite of standardsJBoss ON is a console based advanced management
based technologies and services, allowing open sourceplatform for inventorying, administering, monitoring,
and traditional software applications to be co-existedand updating JEMS applications. Jboss ON is an
and can be deployed on reliable, secure, scalable andagent-based platform that is deployed locally.
highly performing platforms. To the enterprise, it isThe most important JBoss ON Modules are:
the power to assemble and dissemble theInventory, allows you to catalog IT assets spanning
architecture, software, middleware, hardware andplatforms (Linux, HP/UX, Solaris, Windows, AIX),
applications that fulfill the goals of the business.servers (Apache Web Server, Apache Tomcat,
Open Source Software (OSS):JBoss AS), and services (EJB, Message Driven Beans,
With OSS, the code is protected by a special licensedata sources). Assets can be added manually or
GNU General Public License (GPL) that ensuresauto-discovered providing enhanced visibility over
everyone has access to code. That means no oneyour critical business applications including their
company can fully own it. You can see the code,versions and dependencies.
change it and learn from it. Bugs are more quicklyAdministration provides a single location for
found and fixed. And when customers don't like howperforming key control functions such as start, stop,
one vendor is serving them, they can choose anotherand re-start across the entire JEMS platform.
without overhauling their infrastructure. No moreAdministration functions can be applied to a single
technology lock-in. No more monopolies.application or across an enterprise cluster. Operations
The marriage between SOA (Service orientedcan also be scheduled for later dates, on-demand or
architecture or software as a service) and OSSon a recurring basis. This module also allows you to
though not revolutionary because of the weight ofroll-back to previous versions if necessary.
the IT legacy, is surely evolving gradually. The CEO'sMonitoring provides extensive monitoring capabilities
and CIO's are not happy with the vendor lock-in andfor the JEMS platform along with supporting
the tight integration of their architecture and thecomponents such as operating systems (Windows,
prize they pay. This problem is very well addressedLinux, and UNIX), Apache Tomcat, Apache Web
by SOA and OSS.Server and any JEMS-based applications. The
The second day was Red Hat Developer Day; it wasMonitoring Module continuously builds and updates a
aimed to bring together Linux developers and usersmodel of behavior of every measurement being
to help grow open source technologies. Red Hatcollected. This allows you to define alerts relevant to
provides a platform for improving development,the actual behavior of your infrastructure. Baselines
techniques, tools and standards through the sharingare also utilized to identify out of band problems. This
of technical knowledge and expertise. These effortsallows you to quickly identify resources within your
are to encourage open source development in India.infrastructure that require attention as well as get a
Red Hat is initiating the Red Hat Developer Program,historical view of what was happening at the time of
a community development program in India throughthe fault.
Red Hat 108. Red Hat 108 is a community of and forJBoss portal:
open source developers.JBoss Portal has a business friendly open source
The other topics covered are:-license that makes it free to download, use, embed,
Virtualization:and distribute. JBoss Portal provides a framework for
Virtualization means the operating system is isolatedcentralized and secure access to applications and
from the hardware it's running on. Several operatinginformation, which fosters collaboration, streamlines
systems can run on one machine, and differentbusiness processes, and reduces costs. Since JBoss
workloads can be easily combined and moved. WithPortal is based on open standards, it can incorporate
virtualization, you can:components into the Portal as standardized and
Move workloads from server to server.reusable Portlets.
Change hardware without retesting softwareThe symposium also included topics about Red Hat
Allows isolation of failures and control access to data.Road Map, Lowering TCO and Increasing ROI with
Manipulate to maximize processing power andJEMS (JBoss Enterprise Management Suite), Security
capacityand ID Management, Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red
Have a safe, secure space for testing.Hat Global File System.
Virtualization technology can help lower costs by