GroundWork Cuts Price on Open Source Systems Management Tool
October 13, 2009 Alex Woodie
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Organizations looking for the type of functionality one would get with a “big four” systems management tool, but don’t want to pay a premium price, may want to check out the new pricing scheme laid out last week by GroundWork Open Source, which develops commercial open source software for managing heterogeneous computing environments. GroundWork develops open source systems management tools that can be used to monitor and manage tens of thousands of devices. The company’s products are largely based on dozens of different open source products and standards, including the Ganglia grid and cluster management software, the Nagios systems management tools (where the product’s i OS functionality originates), the Syslog-NG systems management standard, the Cacti graphing tool, the BIRT reporting tool–along with the core LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) platform. GroundWork allows anybody to download the community edition of its software free of charge, while customers who want more advanced features and on-call technical support would be encouraged to purchase the professional or enterprise versions. With last week’s announcement, GroundWork is dropping the price of the enterprise version of the product for small environments. For $49 per year, customers can manage up to 100 devices, giving them a taste of what GroundWork can do. The company also shook up its pricing model to enable better “apples-to-apples” comparisons against the Big 4 systems management vendors. The vendor’s new Flex pricing adopts per-device fee $40 to $95, which will allow customers to compare GroundWork’s offerings against the likes of BMC, CA, HP, and IBM. “The average Big 4 monitoring product charges about $100 per year, per device, in annual maintenance at standard support levels,” says Tara Spalding, vice president of marketing for GroundWork. “By comparison, the equivalent Flex pricing offers a 50 percent annual savings.” RELATED STORIES GroundWork Revs Performance of Monitoring Tool GroundWork Monitor 5.3 Ready for Testing Open Source Systems Management Works with i5/OS GroundWork Delivers Open Source System Monitoring Tool
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