Open Source Data Center Management Platform - with Will Hurley, CTO of Qlusters

Open Source Data Center Management Platform - with Will Hurley CTO of Qlusters

Welcome back to the Talking Portraits studio in South Austin. This podcast has a fairly technical nature to it so I'm going to set the stage here for a broader audience. I think you'll find this interesting. I sure did.

Have you ever wondered what a IT data center looks like or how it operates? There isn't much to really see these days. It's not like the olden days of a single huge computer with blinking lights.  It's more like racks of computers that look like really thin PCs, and the center is more like a collection of locations around the world in rooms or small closets.  Ten years ago, when I was an IT manager at Motorola, I managed mulitple servers for the semiconductor design team. It's a 24/7 job where you carry around a pager just waiting for something to go wrong. You then jump in your car in a hurry to your data center and start moving cables around, bringing new servers on line whenever there is a problem.

OK, that was 10 years ago, but sadly, for smaller businesses with multiple servers, it's gotten only slightly better. What was true then is true now, to a degree: You hand-code some Pearl scripts to lash together servers in various ways, hoping this will hold you for a while, until problems or peak service demands hit you - often unexpectedly.

This afternoon I have Will Hurley with me from OpenQRM.org to talk about his company's technology that is an Open Source management platform for managing data centers. What's fascinating is how his business is structured and how they have zeroed in on a marketing opportunity with business value that is easy to identify. OpenQRM has a very creative approach, generating profits and supporting the open source community at the same time. I like that.

Their goal is to help small to medium-sized businesses more efficently manage data their center(s). Qlusters' product is Open QRM and it includes the same kinds of features you see from the big vendors in this market - automatic, Policy-based Provisioning - only their tool is open source, so it's more easily extensible. I learned a lot in this interview and hope you do too. Let's speak with Will (or Whurly) now.

Tom
Special thanks to Andreas Haefliger's playing of Chopin for the intro and outro on this podcast. You can find his CD on Magnatune: Andreas Haefliger: Mozart on the Piano