Red Hat, Hyperic Make Theirs An Open Relationship

Red Hat and Hyperic paired up on Valentine's Day to launch a new open-source management platform project.

The intent of the RHQ project, which went live Feb. 14, is to develop common management platform services for both Hyperic and Red Hat products. The first deliverable in the project will be Red Hat's JBoss Operations Network v2.0, which is due in the spring.

"We will collaborate in the open and take the results of that collaboration and put them back into our product suite. Red Hat will use the results in the future JBoss Operations Network, and Hyperic may use these results in future versions of HQ," said Paul Melmon, senior vice president of engineering at Hyperic.

Hyperic's HQ management software provides monitoring, troubleshooting and remote control. It can automatically discover Web infrastructure components and update asset inventory.

The RHQ project will be open to contributions from other developers as well.

The primary focus of the project is to insure interoperability of management agents from both Red Hat and Hyperic. "Management extensions from one product suite will work with the other's server stack. We'll use common models in the way we manage our data," Melmon explained.

The project will also serve to speed development of provisioning and configuration management functions, he added.

Customers benefit from the RHQ project by having a single source for a range of technologies, pointed out Andi Mann, research director at Enterprise Management Associates.

"Customers will be able go to Red Hat—a big name and the number one Linux platform—and get the OS and middleware and database and the management as well. It extends that stack and gives you a well integrated management platform for the operating environment, and it gives you a single point of contact for support, development requests and technical information," he said.

Melmon hailed the RHQ project as an example of the power of the open source model, just as the open source movement celebrated its 10^th anniversary this week.

Customers benefit from the open collaboration because new functionality reaches the market faster. It also fosters greater depth and breadth of functionality.

The RHQ project is an extension of a partnership the two vendors struck last November.

The URL for the project site is http://www.rhq-project.org.