In mid-April, Qlusters Inc., opted to drop its sponsorship of the openQRM project, an open source provisioning and monitoring tool. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based provider of data center management products and services handed over openQRM to the open source folks at SourceForge where the project will reportedly continue under the tutelage of project manager Matt Rechenburg. In a subsequent blog post, Matthew Aslett, an enterprise software analyst at the 451 Group speculates on the fate of Qlusters, wondering whether the OpenQRM announcement signals the demise of the “little four” group of open source systems management vendors.

Could GroundWork, Hyperic and Zenoss possibly be on the verge of quietly disengaging from the world of open source systems management?

The folks at GroundWork took enough exception to Aslett’s post to contact me and give me their perspective. “Going with one of the big four, or going with one of the open source vendors isn’t an either or choice,” said David Dennis, senior director of product marketing at GroundWork. In terms of systems management tools, “there are alternatives from smaller vendors that are displacing or complementing specific pieces of what the big vendors offer,” he said. “What we see is a melding of the offerings from smaller vendors with big vendors.”

Andi Mann, an analyst with the Enterprise Management Group has long been a proponent of an ecosystem of systems management providers, believing that no single vendor can provide all the capabilities required by most customers. And vendors both big and small seem to share this perspective if a few timely announcements are any indication.

Just this week, Netuitive Inc., a provider of performance management software announced integrations with systems management tool HP OpenView with the idea of enabling an end-to-end view into the health of business service management. And big four vendor CA has teamed up with process automation company Opalis Software in an OEM agreement designed to overlay a process automation layer on top of CA’s data center tools for change, control and configuration management.

So, notwithstanding what happens with Qlusters in the future, the systems management ecosystem seems to be evolving nicely.

The Distributed Management Task Force, the IT industry organization leading the development of interoperable systems management standards, accepted a draft specification that will allow the sharing of information between Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) from multiple vendors. The new spec, which was submitted by a working group of multiple CMDB vendors, aims to enable companies to federate and access information from complex, multi-vendor IT infrastructures.

In this video from the Gartner Data Center Conference, DMTF President Winston Bumpus talks about the news, and the organization’s recent work in server virtualization standards:

The CMDB working group is comprised of BMC Software, CA, Fujitsu, HP, IBM and Microsoft — the project has been in the works since April 2006.

I just saw this cool story about a project at Wachovia Bank’s data center. The company is working with two vendors and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte to create a 3-D map of the firm’s sprawling data center operations. The company is also working with Tideway Systems and Intepoint on the project.

Here’s what the report had to say about the project:

Wachovia is rendering 3-D models down to the level of individual servers in buildings, according to Jacob Hall, who heads the data center group at Wachovia (WB). Wachovia hopes the project will provide better visualization of IT assets and their power consumption. Curiously, the project doesn’t include instrumentation of the equipment for real-time monitoring, a key focus of many data center management products.

In a similar vein, Hewlett-Packard introduced a 3-D mapping tool for data centers this summer, called Thermal Zone Mapping, which generates a 3-D image of a data center, its hot spots and airflow.

Being a child of the 1980s, I think anything in 3-D is pretty rad - even if the technology doesn’t require the ever stylish red-and-blue-lensed cardboard shades.

A handful of vendors at the Data Center Decisions conference in Chicago gave quick, speed-dating style overviews of their latest and greatest technologies yesterday, including a new Active Power Management tool from Cassatt, 10 Gbit Ethernet (GBE) intelligent network interface cards (NICs) from NextXen, iSCSI SANs from Sanrad Inc. and backup tools from Vizioncore.

Sanrad Inc. CEO Dave DuPont discussed “better ways to build storage networking.” While Fibre Channel SAN is widely used and relied upon, an iSCSI implementation can be done using existing storage, Ethernet networks, and Sanrad’s iSCSI switch.

George Pradel, Vizioncore’s senior systems engineer, showed what the company’s flagship product vRanger Pro can do. vRanger Pro, which works with VMware virtualization products, does full-image backups while virtual machines are running. It includes a VSS driver that uses Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Copy Service for consistent images and P2V disaster recovery capabilities.

Agilysys discussed the future of the data center and challenges such as density, power and cooling costs. The company specializes in data center infrastructure.

CXtec ran through their fiber optic cable infrastructure expertise and how to reduce cabling by one third to increase cooling efficiencies with Microcore, a new fiber trunk design. Another storage solution vendor, SANpulse Technologies Inc. discussed its products that automate the SAN.

NextXen pitched users on the benefits of 10 GbE intelligent networking networking technology that keep up with today’s increased CPU utilization, requiring greater bandwidth.

Cassatt proposed an active approach to power management and described a product that intelligently powers servers on and off, either by time of day, demand (i.e., turn off when idle), in power emergencies, or as operational policies dictate.

Pretty cool stuff, even if some of it has been around for a while and was simply spotlighted by vendors at the show.

Most data centers out there have a mix of hardware and software vendors, and as a result it can often be tough to get those devices and applications to speak to one another in the same language. Correct me if I’m wrong here.

I’m asking this because the CMDB Federation working group has just announced a specification for sharing information between CMDBs and other management data repositories such as asset management and service desk software. The federation is no joke — it includes heavyweights like BMC, CA, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Microsoft.

The group hopes that the specification becomes a standard way for vendors’ software to communicate configuration data with one another so that users know about everything in their IT environments.

Would that be helpful? I’d like to hear from users out there about whether it’s difficult to keep track of everything they have, and if so, whether a standard way for those applications and hardware to speak to one another would be a good thing.

mValent Inc. has announced that its application and configuration management software can now tap into Microsoft Windows servers.

mValent Integrity will now be able to manage Microsoft servers such as the Internet Information Server (IIS), SQL Server and Sharepoint.

Jim Hickey, mValent’s chief marketing officer, said this will give customers a chance to manage more servers under one umbrella. “When you have one approach you have greater ability to instill adoption and adherence to change management philosophy,” he said.

Integrity can now run on Windows, Linux and Solaris and can tap into Java and packaged applications on Windows and Linux servers, mainframes, and other platforms.

mValent, based in Burlington, Mass., has 25 customers right now. Hickey wouldn’t say how much Integrity costs, but said that having the ability to tap into Windows servers would demand about a 15-percent increase in price over the normal Integrity software.

Managed Objects is trying to separate itself from the application discovery pack by focusing on homegrown software — those programs created by some dude that maybe hasn’t been with the company since the Clinton administration.

With its Application Configuration Manager, which it released this week, Managed Objects seeks to help users find out what those in-house applications are doing and how they connect to other in-house apps as well as big-name software.

The company, based in McLean, Va., has been around 10 years and has more than 300 customers, according to its marketing director Dustin McNabb.

Application Configuration Manager will be available in July with prices starting at $100,000.

The IT Skeptic says the CMDB tidal wave is actually a ripple. This blogger has called CMDB software a bloated dead elephant, among other things. Normally the phrase “IT Service Management” sends me into a narcoleptic coma, while the marketing person spends the next several minutes trying to revive me. But this Web site could change all that.

If ITIL or CMDB implementation have you in tears, this is the site for you.

From a recent blog posting: One wonders how many people “doing” CMDB are in fact putting in an asset database, or license management, or some other user-defined version of CMDB. Or how many are there where “doing” means Fred has been told to come up with something in his spare time with no budget. Or where “doing” means we bought a tool that says CMDB on the brochure but we haven’t got past implementing network alerting or incident tickets yet.

 Admittedly, recent research from SearchDataCenter.com shows increasingly more people are “doing” something with CMDB. Keep your eye out for mockery from the IT Skeptic once we publish it. I’ll be looking forward to it.