GroundWork Management Touches the Cloud

Cloud computing services have become very popular because of their simple deployment and potential cost savings. However, managing these connections has been a challenge, one that GroundWork Open Source is trying to tackle.The vendor announced GroundWork Monitor Cloud Connector for Eucalyptus, which is designed to monitor open source cloud services. The software monitors the performance of cloud services and application, based on Eucalyptus and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) private clouds. The management tool supports topology discovery and automatic performance monitoring based on users defined settings. The feature is available with GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Flex, whose pricing starts at $4,000 annually.

The open source approach has been gradually making its way into the cloud services marketplace. Eucalyptus System has developed open source cloud infrastructure software with interfaces that are compatible with Amazon's EC2 service. In business since early 2008, the venture based start up began its work as part of a National Science Foundation research project at University of California, Santa Barbara. Ubuntu is one of the many variants of the Linux operating system. Recently, the software has been tweaked so it can operate in the cloud.

GroundWork has been at the forefront of developing open source management software, so support for Eucalyptus and UEC fits with the company's business model. While small and medium businesses have been moving to cloud services, acceptance of open source services is in a nascent stage of development. Ground Work is trying to position itself to take advantage of a potential uptick in acceptance as the market matures.