Open Source in the Data Center: The Upside and Downside for Service Providers

IT Editorial

Wednesday, 09 January 2008 13:16

Written by David F. Link

The benefits of open source are obvious. From databases to IDS to e-mail filters, open source offers dozens of solutions for each task. At last count, there were over 160,000 projects on Sourceforge.net alone. The “free” price tag of open source solutions is a compelling motivation to try a solution out to see if it will solve at least some of your problems.

But, despite the hype, open source does not mean “free”. There are hidden costs inherent in using these tools, from additional development resources needed for integration, installation and maintenance to more limited feature sets and uncertain roadmaps that may not meet your company’s needs for scalability and growth.

There’s less risk associated with using well-supported open source tools, but that category is a very small percentage of the open source tools available. Basic IT tasks are also a natural fit for open source to provide simple solutions to problems faced by organizations big and small. But when it comes to more complex IT functions, for example application and systems management, the viable open source options narrow dramatically and the additional resources necessary to deploy complete solutions can erase any initial cost savings.

For Service Providers: Success Creates Challenges
For service providers, in particular, open source tools can help to get you up and running quickly and relatively cheaply with basic monitoring in place. But if you’re like everyone else, your goal is to grow your business, and that’s precisely when using open source can turn into a liability.

Fast-growing service providers quickly hit the walls of scalability and complexity. Scalability refers both to the efficient utilization of limited resources and to growth rate. In other words, the right solutions should create economies of scale that enable you to grow your customer base on demand without a proportional increase in headcount. At the same time, the competitive service provider landscape often drives companies to deliver more sophisticated and value-added services as your customer base broadens and you strive to capture more revenue per customer.  The bar keeps getting raised, and open source tools that were once the right fit no longer help you clear the height.

The Hidden Costs of Open Source
When evaluating open source tools, IT managers need to be aware of the “hidden costs,” or risk potential problems down the road.

opus:interactive, a green data center and managed services provider based in Portland, Oregon, has experienced many of the benefits and problems inherent with open source technologies first-hand.  Until recently, the company relied on open source IT management tools in their data center.

“As our client base grew, the feature sets in our open source IT management solutions began to grow stagnant,” said Jeremy Sherwood, business solutions executive for opus:interactive.  “The associated development communities were unable to provide the rapid updates and customization we needed for continued success with a growing client base.  Because we were not paying for any kind of developer support, instead just relying on community involvement, there was no real urgency in solving our problems.”

Another hurdle for open source adoption is the credibility factor due to lack of a recognizable brand-name. There’s a saying, “no one ever got fired for choosing [insert big brand name here]”. The reality is that IT professionals have to justify their purchases – whether it’s to internal management or to external customers evaluating a service provider’s offerings.

“If the solution is going to be highly visible to clients, such as storage or, to some extent, IT monitoring, the name is important,” said Patrick Craig, data center manager for DataChambers, LLC, a managed service provider and data center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.  “While there may or may not be any discernible difference in product performance, a recognizable product often puts the decision-makers in client organizations at ease.”

There are also hidden resource and development costs that many companies either don’t take into account or can’t assess accurately prior to implementation, As point solutions are added for specific tasks, the complexity of managing the network also increases, raising the likelihood of interoperability problems that must be solved with precious resources. Companies either invest in in-house development resources or bring in outside consultants to assess, deploy, integrate and continue to customize open source tools for their specific IT environments.

“Literally, for any given task, you could have dozens of open source tools at your disposal,” said Sherwood. “But how do you know which will work with your system, which is still supported and what the solution’s track record is?  You don’t.  You need to assign someone, either internally or as a consultant, to sort through the various applications, test each one and compile a list of recommendations.  For some open source tools, you start accumulating costs before you even find the appropriate application.”

Data centers don’t evaluate solutions based on cost alone. In the end, it’s really value that matters. At the lower end, open source solutions deliver great value. As long as you (and your customers) can get by with this, those free solutions look pretty good. As data centers grow and customers require more from their service providers, there is a shift to proactive and integrated monitoring that stand-alone open source tools cannot provide without a lot more associated costs.

“When you need a different monitoring tool for each system you have, and simply cannot integrate all your disparate IT management tools into one solution…then it’s time to switch solutions,” said Sherwood.

Tips for Making Smart Open Source Choices
When it comes to choosing and implementing open source solutions in a growing data center,, both Sherwood and Craig agree that certain rules need to be followed.  For one, managers should look for development communities that have been active for some time, with successful launches and a satisfied user base.  If a data center can “adopt” an open source project early in its development phase, there are also added benefits.

“Getting into an open source project early can be a huge factor in determining whether or not the future versions of the project will meet your organization’s needs,” said Sherwood.  “Your data center could effectively drive the development of the product, shaping it around what you perceive as a need for your operation and the data center community as a whole.  With continued support, the likelihood of the project failing or losing steam is much lower than if you are just a casual user.”

Another point to consider is the service contract.  Some open source developers offer support or service contacts with their product at an additional cost, which aids in the future integration or customization of the solution as new systems are added or additional feature sets are required.

With growth on the mind, there will come a time in the data center lifecycle that traffic and network scale will simply become too massive for some open source IT management solutions.  Before this point is reached, however, there are warning signs to show managers that a new solution will be needed soon.

“When you start spending more time integrating and configuring solutions than dealing with customer issues and support, it’s time to find a new IT management tool,” said Craig.  “At the core level, data centers are about customer needs and wants, not about testing or implementing open source solutions that may or may not eventually meet these needs.”

One reason that companies have “made do” with customized open source tools for so long was the sticker shock that came with the traditional framework-type solutions for IT management. Sure you got a comprehensive and sophisticated toolset, but you also ended up paying orders of magnitude more than for open source alternatives. In this scenario, the “value” needle was heavily tipped towards open source.

But new technologies, including the open source LAMP stack, have enabled new competitors to bring comprehensive IT management solutions to market at much lower prices. Suddenly the open source trade-off is not as attractive.

When you do a product value comparison, make sure to look at the total cost of investment (TCO) – open source versus commercial. For more sophisticated toolsets, open source (and the development necessary to make it do what you need) can actually cost more than the commercial tools available today.

Conclusion
All open source tools are not created equal so use them where they make sense.  While you shouldn’t use an unsupported systems management tool to support a business-critical application, you absolutely should use a tried-and-true database like MySQL – just make sure that the TCO is right and you have done the planning, looking at the business needs today and into the future.

About David F. Link
David Link is the president and CEO of ScienceLogic, LLC (www.sciencelogic.com), a provider of appliance solutions for comprehensive IT operations management. 

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