Open Source > NetworkingEssentials

In the real estate world, the mantra is location, location, location. In the network and server administration world, the mantra is visibility, visibility, visibility. If you don't know what your network and servers are doing at every second of the day, you're flying blind. Sooner or later, you're going to meet with disaster.

Vyatta, a maker of open source routers, this week unveiled a product for the small-to-midsize business market.

10G Ethernet vendor Force10 Networks is changing the operating system on its data centre switches to FreeBSD, an open source platform, with the aim of improving switch performance for customers.

When the city of Madera, California, needed a new voice system, it turned to open-source technology -- not just for the IP telephony but for an entire network-infrastructure overhaul and loads of other functions. All the renovations cost less than half the estimated price of deploying a commercial voice over IP VoIP system alone. This smart, budget-wise use of open source across the network wins the city a 2007 Enterprise All-Star Award.

Open source software has had a foothold in the enterprise monitoring sphere for almost as long as open source has existed. One only needs to look at the sheer ubiquity of small applications such as MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher) and its RRDTool back end to see that. What we haven't had from open source is the big application -- the comprehensive, community supported open source enterprise management suite that provides the depth and breadth of functionality that businesses need and generally find in closed-source competitors. That is changing in leaps and bounds. In fact, open source enterprise monitoring solutions are evolving so quickly, we won't even try to declare a clear winner yet -- but we're working on it.

The selection of open source software available to network managers just got a little bigger, as three companies separately unveiled tools geared for change and configuration management, systems monitoring and server management.