Guild Companies

Opsware thinks that there is more to managing data centers than reaching out and taking control of machines. With the upcoming release of Opsware System 4.0, Opsware, a publicly traded company that has as a founder Marc Andreesen (who was also a founder of Netscape), is going to add features and hooks into the system management suite that lets it control something else of vital importance at IT shops these days: budget dollars.

The Opsware System is a system management suite that helps install, update, maintain, and dynamically provision instances of the five major operating systems--Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX--and some 60 popular applications--including middleware, databases, and Web infrastructure programs--that ride on top of those operating systems. There is a special edition of Opsware System for blade servers, which have a unique architecture, compared with stand-alone servers.

It seems everybody has figured out that the complexity of computer systems is making them unmanageable and costly, and each major platform vendor thinks it has a unique answer to the problem. Opsware is trying to cover all of its bases and partner with as many players as possible.

Opsware has partnered with Microsoft, as part of its Dynamic Systems Initiative, which is Bill Gates' answer to IBM's eLiza/On Demand initiative, which has been evolving over the past two years and will need several more years in order to reach the fruition of utility computing with self-healing and self-administering attributes. Opsware is also a partner for Sun Microsystems' N1 system management and virtualization initiative, and it is a preferred platform, according to BEA Systems, for managing its Weblogic application server. As we reported back in June, Opsware inked a deal with IT infrastructure maker Hewlett-Packard to help both of them chase the emerging utility computing market. While Opsware and HP have been working together informally, HP will soon be bolting the Opsware System onto its Utility Data Center product for virtualizing and provisioning servers, storage, and network bandwidth. HP Services also will be able to sell, integrate, and support the Opsware System. HP's global reach should help Opsware to better establish itself in the crowded systems-management market.

One of the add-on features of Opsware System 4.0, due in September, is Data Center Intelligence, which was developed under the code-name "Curie." There is a per-server charge for Opsware System itself, but the Data Center Intelligence module will be sold as an adjunct for the main Opsware System host console, not on a per-server basis. Raj Gossain, senior director of product marketing at Opsware, says that exact pricing for the module has not been set, but if the module works as described, the odds favor IT managers adding it to their installations.

That's because the Data Center Intelligence module will take the information about servers, software, and operators that it uses in the course of managing a network of machines and turn it on its end, so it can become a sophisticated asset management system.

This was the initial genius that made Dell's specialized Web sites for companies that bought its computers, called Dell Premier Pages, so popular with IT managers. Dell built a little store for the IT manager, so company employees and managers authorized to acquire PCs could buy preconfigured, pre-negotiated machines, which greatly streamlined the buying process. The Premier Pages also kept detailed track of all the machines acquired and all of the parts that were added to particular machines as they were used. They were, in effect, an asset management system that Dell gave to its customers, without charge.

With the Data Center Intelligence module, the job of identifying where money is being spent in the data center or across many data centers is greatly simplified. Opsware System 4.0 with Data Center Intelligence will be able to generate reports that show managers where the greatest effort is being expended in the day-to-day operations of the machinery and in their software. This information, when combined with payroll information and IT expenses in the company's accounting systems, will be able to show where companies are not only expending their most effort, but where they are spending the most money.

According to surveys done by market researcher Gartner, up to 65 percent of the costs of running a big data center has to do with the labor related to setting up and maintaining servers, databases, and middleware, and coping with changes to applications. Data Center Intelligence will show what servers and software are running in particular locations, explain the changes on these machines, and show what IT administration and application staff are doing on the machines. By knowing this, a more accurate reckoning of IT costs can be constructed, says Gossain, than is possible with the fixed-asset module of an ERP program or an asset-management program designed specifically to track IT resources. Data Center Intelligence will include a Web services API based on the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) protocol, so it can talk to other IT systems to get the financial information to couple to the operations data that Opsware gathers. Cossain says that trying to determine people costs in IT is still largely a matter of extracting data from service ticketing systems, which are based on data entered by hand, by techs and administrators. These ticketing systems are prone to errors. Opsware, on the other hand, is watching what administrators are doing, on a minute-by-minute basis. Showing what each administrator is doing is not very difficult, and this activity can be correlated to platform information to then determine which platforms are most cost-effective and which ones are resource hogs.

The one company that has not yet partnered with Opsware is IBM. Big Blue acquired Think Dynamics, a pseudo-competitor of Opsware that is focused on server and storage virtualization, earlier this year to round out its On Demand efforts. At this point, according to Tim Howe, chief technology officer at Opsware, an IBM partnership seems unlikely. "We would love to partner with IBM," he says. "But, frankly, I don't think there is much of a chance to partner with IBM right now." The implication is that IBM has its own products and its own agenda.

In addition to previewing the Data Center Intelligence capabilities of the future Opsware System, the company announced yesterday that it had signed Inflow--an operator of a dozen data centers, based on Windows, Linux, and Unix servers, that provide computing to some 750 customers for hosting their respective Internet applications--as a user of Opsware System to manage portions of its data centers. Inflow sells services to small and midsized businesses and has a hosting business that is similar in nature, but not in size, to that of Opsware's biggest partner, Electronic Data Systems. EDS acquired the hosting businesses of Opsware, which used to be known as Loudcloud, in August 2002 for $63.5 million as the company was transitioning from being a hosting provider to becoming a seller of system management tools. Subsequently, EDS bought Opsware software, worth $52 million, which it is using to automate 50,000 servers in 14 data centers. EDS figures that the Opsware programs will save it more than $100 million in operations costs over three years. MetLife, Northrup Grumman, Gateway, and the U.S. Department of Energy are also big customers of Opsware.

At this time, says Gossain, the average Opsware customer is managing from hundreds to thousands of servers and has spent about $500,000 on Opsware programs. This data excludes sales to EDS, which skew the averages substantially.