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With shrinking IT budgets and growing scale of the IT infrastructure, a rising number of CIOs are looking at open source solutions as a viable alternative. Today, the open source ecosystem is quite mature and offers a number of attractive alternatives for CIOs to save operational costs. As many of these open source infrastructure management tools have many of the same capabilities that their commercial proprietary counterparts offer, they are being actively considered by many CIOs in India.

India’s largest integrated stainless steel manufacturer uses open source infrastructure management tool, Nagios, to manage an IT landscape that consists of over hundred servers, 2,500 desktops, 50 network printers and 20 Wi-Fi devices. With the implementation of Nagios, the IT team has the capability

to monitor applications, services, operating systems, network protocols, system metrics and infrastructure components with a single tool. Fast detection of infrastructure outages are made possible as alerts can be delivered to technical staff via e-mail or SMS. Escalation capabilities ensure alert notifications reach the right people.

The importance of the open source tool is best summed up by Ajay Dhir, Group CIO, JSL, “The open source tool performs the role of an ICU

center for us, as it gives us predictive reports on the health of the entire IT infrastructure.”

Cost is perhaps the biggest motivator as organizations can save huge costs with respect to licenses. In the case of JSL, the implementation costs have been limited to the procurement of a server and modem – which works out to ` 10 lakh. Dhir says that a comparative commercial system would have easily cost the company a minimum of ` 40 lakh.

Manoj Chandiramani, who was earlier a CIO with MF Global, and is now President and CEO, SAIMAA Global Solutions, explains the mathematics. “On an average, the bare minimum software license cost for managing a desktop is ` 600. For an organization with 300 desktops, this works out to ` 1.8 lakh per month. If you add the server and network components, the costs go up exponentially,” explains Chandiramani. For large organizations with thousands of servers and network components, the infrastructure management costs only due to licenses can be upwards of ` 50 lakh per year.

While lower costs continue to

cover story

Adoption of open source infrastructure management tools on the rise

o p e n s o u r c e

By Srikanth RP

A growing number of Indian CIOs are considering open source network management tools to manage their infrastructure

“The open source tool performs the role of an ICU center for us, as it gives us predictive reports on the health of the entire IT infrastructure”

Ajay Dhir, Group CIO, JSL

Company Open source solution Usage

JSL Nagios Uses Nagios to manage an IT landscape that consists of over hundred servers, 2500 desktops, 50 network printers and 20 Wi-Fi devices

InfoAxon Technologies Nagios Uses Nagios for monitoring 25 servers for overseas customers

Lifespring Hospitals Zabbix Uses Zabbix to monitor its internal IT infrastructure

Indo Asian Fusegear Nagios, ntop Uses open source solutions to monitor 50 servers in addition to routers, Wi-Fi devices, print servers and IP cameras.

WhO is Using Open sOUrCe infrastrUCtUre management tOOls?

30 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k january 2011 www.informationweek.in

remain a big attraction for adoption of open source solutions, what has also swung the tide in the favor of open source is the rising number of firms who offer professional support services. The icing on the cake is the fact that professional support services are provided by most of the open source companies that have created the open source product or platform.

Some CIOs are also looking at open source solutions as an alternative vendor strategy. “We wanted an alternate licensing strategy against going with the normal strategy of choosing a traditional software vendor. Usage of open source tools is a viable strategy to reduce software licensing costs, which are probably the single largest cost for most IT capex budgets in an enterprise,” says Noel Thomas, VP - IT and CISO, Integreon.

Besides lower costs, customization is a big attraction. For example, InfoAxon Technologies, which calls itself India’s first open source integration company, uses Nagios to monitor the health of its servers and proactively manage the availability of mission critical business applications for its customers. The firm chose Nagios as it wanted a tool which was easy to configure and did not have a complex and heavy footprint.

Hence, as open source tools are maturing with active help from the community, CIOs are using this opportunity to customize open source tools to suit their unique requirements. “In the case of open source, we select the features required by us and not what the product offers. Moreover, if you have an internal IT team, then the same can be implemented without

any cost,” points out Balwant Singh, Head-IT, Indo Asian Fusegear. The firm is using Nagios and ntop and is also exploring OSSIM (Open Source Security Information Management). Using open source solutions, the firm is monitoring 50 servers in addition to routers, Wi-Fi devices, print servers and IP cameras.

The ability to customize and innovate is a big draw for system integrators and service providers, as

they can add features according to business requirements.

“We have enhanced Nagios and written our own monitoring agents for monitoring processes and integrated it with an SMS engine for automated alerts on mobiles. We have also integrated Nagios with other open source BI frameworks for complex data analysis and visualization. This has helped us in providing SLA-based support and maintenance services to our customers,” explains Sanjib Dey, OSS Infrastructure Head, InfoAxon Technologies. The firm is currently

monitoring 25 servers for overseas customers using Nagios.

Lessons from the open road For enterprises that are used to consulting the vendor for any problems that they face while using the vendor’s solutions, open source may initially pose some minor roadblocks. While the software itself is free to use as there is no license, many enterprises may

find the learning curve steep. To get acquainted, Indian CIOs are turning to the Internet, and resolving problems by posting their queries in dedicated forums.

“We did self learning over the Internet, installed the package ourselves on a test server, learnt the nuances of the same over a period of time and then started the implementation,” says Dhir of JSL. Dhir says that his team had to adjust the threshold levels for alerts generated by the application so that there were no false alarms and the firm did not miss out on important alerts. Once this was fine tuned, it has been smooth sailing and today JSL can monitor all its important devices.

While savings in license costs are a big motivation, adoption of open source without a proper roadmap can lead to failure of using open source to its full potential. “As a leading open source monitoring platform, Nagios provides the key business benefits of

“most CIos do not have the experience or the people with the required skill sets to get the best out of open source solutions”

Manoj Chandiramani, President and CEO, SAIMAA Global Solutions

“organizations need to identify and fill functionality gaps in open source solutions such as nagios”

Nikhil Kapoor, CTO, InfoAxon

the open source community thrives on sharing of knowledge and overcoming issues. hence, organizations must be open to share their experience – both good and bad with their peers

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flexibility and innovation at fraction of costs. However, as with any other open source solution, one needs to have a proper roadmap around what you want to achieve out of the solution—both in the short term and the long term. Most organizations stop at just implementing its out-of-box capabilities,” says Nikhil Kapoor, CTO, InfoAxon.

Kapoor advises CIOs to plan and invest for continuous upgrades, resources and documentation. He also believes that organizations need to identify and fill the functionality gaps in open source solutions such as Nagios. “Analysis and visualization gaps can be filled by integration of other open source analysis software and reporting frameworks. Similarly, open source solutions can be integrated with SMS for rule-based alerts on mobile phones. Further, integration with help desk or bug tracking software can be done to automatically create support tickets,” explains Kapoor.

The timing of selecting the open source project can also be crucial. For example, Dhir decided to look at open source projects during the recessionary period of 2009, when the whole organization was trying to reduce costs. Organizations must also be ready to face criticism and pressure.

To ensure success, organizations must plan well – especially if they do not have the guiding hand of a vendor.

“Organizations must follow the Plan Do Check Act (PDCA) cycle. In fact, Plan and Check in great detail before you start Do and Act,” cautions Dhir.

For CIOs who are just starting out to explore the open road, choosing non-critical applications may be a starting point. “Consider open source tools for your non-mission critical areas. After doing your research on available options, consider the impact - both direct and indirect – on the criticality of the area where you are deploying the tool,” opines Thomas of Integreon.

Like most areas, experience matters in the open source arena too. Involving a system integrator that has good experience of deploying open source solutions will help an organization deploy open source effectively. For example, SAIMAA Global Solutions offers CIOs the option to outsource the entire setup of building, operating and managing open source infrastructure.

“Most CIOs do not have the experience or the people with the required skill sets to get the best out

of open source solutions. With our experience, we can build and manage the open source infrastructure and offer it as a service,” says Chandiramani. The firm has already signed three customers for managing infrastructure using open source solutions. As Chandiramani’s firm takes away the trouble of installing, configuring and monitoring the infrastructure and provides it at a fraction of the costs of comparable proprietary solutions provided by other vendors, his firm is seeing huge demand from corporates who are keen to try open source solutions.

The open source community thrives on sharing of knowledge and overcoming issues. Hence, organizations must be open to share their experience – both good and bad with their peers. Ajay Dhir, for example, shared his experiences with other CIOs, and provided them with help from his team members.

“It is important to share your knowledge, learning and success with others. The more you share, the more you grow. After our case study was published by InformationWeek and honored by CIO Association of India, we got requests from fellow CIOs for knowledge and experience sharing and we did so very openly. To our pleasant surprise, we saw these companies doing the implementation very fast and going the extra mile by implementing additional features as well,” exclaims Dhir.

While the road to adoption of open source solutions will be not without challenges, the cost benefits and the flexibility to customize are compelling benefits that a CIO cannot ignore today. n

Srikanth RP (srikanth.rp@ubm.com)

Open source tool WebsiteNagios www.nagios.orgOpenNMS www.opennms.orgntop www.ntop.orgGroundWork Open Source www.groundworkopensource.comHyperic HQ www.hyperic.comopenQRM www.openqrm.comMonit http://mmonit.com/monit/Munin http://munin-monitoring.org/Zabbix www.zabbix.comZenoss http://www.zenoss.com/Wireshark www.wireshark.orgOSSIM www.ossim.net

SOme uSeful Open SOurce infraStructure management tOOlS

“Usage of open source tools is a viable strategy to reduce software licensing costs”

Noel Thomas, VP - IT & CISO, Integreon