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openQRM: A boon to Data Center Management!

Who are the guys behind openQRM initiative. If you remember I did cover that in the older post of site, you will find out more about them. They are the founding members of the OMC club.

I may do an interview with the guys in the coming weeks. I am in talks with the folks (among others) as I will be displaying the openQRM during my trip to Africa. BTW: If you want to follow my trip to Africa, please do check my Travel Blog at RealTravel.

Now getting back to openQRM. What is it?

In Qluster's words:

openQRM provides provisioning of the entire software stack on physical servers and virtual machines like VMware and Xen. openQRM also has a policy engine so that resources can be provisioned based on external business needs and the requirements of internal organizations automatically. The Qlusters’ Hot Migration enables the migration of running applications from one machine to another without service interruption.

My take on DataCenter Management and SMB:

I personally think that a lot of offerings and services will eventually be based on several factors. Offering a data center management solution to a SMB market or even small K-12 schools will be a little "overkill". But it actually is NOT! Why? You would not believe me if I told you that even in Holland and Europe the SMB and lower segment is fast growing and will soon reach a pretty cool CMM level. How?

Software is maturing fastSMB is moving fast towards adopting this fast growing and mature softwareNo need to hire new staff (as mature provisioning tools will handle a lot of operations "automatically"No structure or administrative costs which a legacy grown organizations are facingI often see people looking at me like "are you nuts?" but I turn their heads around to take a good look at what their "own" staff is doing. No kidding. I just dropped my son to school (he's five) and was talking to one of the parents (this guy works for another school) and these guys are deploying VMware! Wireless! Imagine! They don't have budget but do sure have ambitions. They want to have a good LMS, A good Email solution, Management report,..aha. So now we're talking. Anyways this is just a small example of today, this morning. And I meet and talk to people on daily basis! I spoke to a big HP subsidiary yesterday at work and was curious too how they are going to do the same. (Meaning: They too see this as a massive market and are working to combat costs and provision services and appliances like those "One click install" options you have on your hosting sites.). And that’s what I mean by the maturity.

VMware has been a major driving force in making people think and work differently. This is a massive challenge and I am amazed how they do this with effortless ease. Anyways dilemma is often the mushrooming effect of tools and management options growing wild around such "happening event" (I mean Virtualization). But that is where openQRM comes in.

What you can do with it?

What you can do with it?

Data Center Management Capabilities:

· Manages thousands of servers

· Tracks your data center’s usage and utilization while generating detailed reports

Automatic, Policy based Provisioning:

· Assigns servers to users and applications according to defined policies

· Dynamically adjusts the amount of allocated servers according to actual usage

· Provides high availability for enterprise services and applications

· Redeploy applications and prepare machines for maintenance with a single click

Simplify and Streamline Data Center Maintenance Tasks

· Separate running applications from physical servers, thereby allowing flexible use of resources and ease of management

· Advanced image management allows shared resources between similar environments

Supports Multiple Configurations:

· Supports booting servers from local disk, NAS or iSCSI

· Supports different partitioning technologies, such as VMWare and Xen

· Full support for servers running Linux 2.4 and 2.6

· Partial support for servers running Microsoft Windows

Easy to deploy:

· Use simple tools to add servers and applications to the openQRM management coverage

· Integrate and leverage existing infrastructure software such as VMWare, Nagios and others

· Use ready made packages to support specific configurations like 3-tier web applications environment



And sure we will all test it and you too can test it when you have your "openQRM Virtual Appliance" on your VMplayer running. This will be available in a few minutes from now!

So hang on tight!

Cheers

Tarry

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