Recently Gartner warned of the open source threat to the Big Four systems management vendors, but I don’t think the current open source solutions are quite ready to take on the big four yet. Systems management just isn't easy. People tend to treat it like electricity and only realize its value when the power is out, but behind the scenes enormous complexity is battled in an effort to keep the lights on.

Most entrants are going to lose the battle of scale. Scale seems like such a simple issue. Say you’ve got 150 Linux boxes you're monitoring. Whenever you need to you can just add another 150 boxes to double the capacity, right? You and I know that’s ludicrous. But since this is a hotly debated topic, and since scale can be hard to visualize, let’s use a simple analogy we can all get behind: a fast car.

The Bugatti Veyron is the world's fastest production car. With a top speed of 253 mph, the Veyron is a marvel of modern engineering. Engineering it, however, was no small feat. The engineers ran into incredible problems with scale. First, they approached the BMW Sauber F1 Team and asked to use their wind tunnel: “Ooh, sorry. Love to help you, but our wind tunnel doesn’t actually go that fast.”

Great. No wind tunnel. Fine, we’ll work on that. Let’s build the car as if we had all the equipment we needed and hash out the details later. Now let’s talk horsepower. To get from 0 to 150 mph takes a mere 191 horsepower. Not too tough to manage—several production pickup trucks can boast that many horses. But to get from 150 to 250 mph (the Veyron's top speed) takes an additional 800 horses! How do you harness that kind of power and fit it all into a single automobile?

Remember our 150 servers? To double our capacity we can't just add another 150 servers. We have to consider power consumption, back up procedures, monitoring, manpower, etc. Just like our new beefed-up server room, the Veyron generates tons of heat. Your car has one radiator; the Veyron has 10. Maybe some of Bugatti’s engineers would be interested in a data center consulting gig . . .

Say we’ve overcome all our obstacles and got our car (server room) built. Now it’s time to test it. A car that goes 253 mph needs a huge space for testing. The engineers at Bugatti allowed a 3rd party to verify the top speed on a 5.5 mile track in Germany. A track so long that if you stand at one end, you cannot see the other because of the curvature of the earth. Now you need gasoline . . . of some sort. At top speed the Veyron—making a whopping 7 mpg—runs out of gas in only 12 minutes. Which is actually a good thing, because the tires would burst in only 15.

What does all this have to do with the little four taking on the Big Four, you ask? Because the little four still have to go from 150 to 253 mph; they aren’t finished growing from small business to enterprise scale. It's easy to say things like “Enterprise Grade” and “Enterprise Ready.” It’s hard to deliver true enterprise solutions. I love open source systems management. In fact I helped start the movement. But we're already seeing some of the big boys start to build strong open source strategies, and I have a feeling we'll see the first of many open source management moves from at least one of them soon. If I were Gartner I wouldn't count one of the Big Four out just yet.

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