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You know how hot carbon footprints, recycling and energy efficiency are right now, well Computacenter are introducing the Green Electronics Council’s EPEAT system, that stands for the snappily titled “Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool System” a tool designed to help identify the environmental friendliness of IT equipment. Based on a system of 23 criteria (I’ve just looked at this and it’s a little mind-boggling) it is designed to help both purchasers and manufacturers move towards more environmentally preferable products. Now I think this is a great idea but I know that in our company at least we sometimes find it difficult enough to implement very basic green practices like reducing paper usage, recycling paper, cardboard etc and helping our customers to dispose conscientiously by implementing the WEEE scheme I think it will take a while for this to become mainstream practice - no excuse really we should all have been doing this a long time ago!

For a long time non-commercial open source projects had exclusive access to an audience. Sites like Slashdot are very focused on open source, commercial software doesn’t get a look in.

With the emergence of commercial open source players things are a little more complex. The commercial open source players have access to traditional media, but they are also able to access the traditional open source audience as well. That is bound to cause problems for the non-commercial players.

Whilst we are on the topic of PowerShell, may as well mention PowerGUI as well.

PowerGUI gives you a nice GUI based interface to the command line PowerShell. Dimitry Sotnikov runs a great blog around PowerShell, PowerGUI and Quest’s other free tools. Quest have got into PowerShell big time.

I’m a fan of Windows PowerShell as I’ve mentioned before. I think it is going to be a boon for Windows admins everywhere.

We’ve had a stab at support for it too.

If you are currently learning about PowerShell, I’d recommend you check out PowerShell Community Extensions project. A large collection of PowerShell tools that will make you more productive.

Michael Tiemann made an interesting post titled Will the Real Open Source CRM Please Stand Up. Alex Fletcher wrote an interesting follow up.

That got me thinking…how kosher are the licences used by the “new wave” open source network management companies? Have Hyperic, Groundwork and Zenoss really got the open source bug, or do they want the open source kudos without really opening up?

I did a bit of digging around, and I am pleased to say that, at least to my non-legal eye, the licences do look the real deal. All of the tools are licensed under the General Public License (GPL).

Just found an interesting book…if you’re a blood ’n guts comms bod then I think this book should find a place in your bookshelf. The book can be found here on the publisher’s website.

The author, Chris Sanders, also has a good blog too. Well worth adding to your feed reader.

If you manage networks in industrial or harsh environments, or if you have serial equipment that you currently have to monitor manually and are maybe wondering about the benefits of device networking, you could do worse than checking out this blog entry by Gary Marr, Senior Field App. Engineer, Lantronix (manufacturers of Netport Serial/Ethernet adaptors)

I was interested to read Open Source: What Makes for Success? by Gordon Haff. Alex Fletcher has written an interesting follow up.

Gordon Haff points out that one property of a successful open source company is to pick a very difficult problem that doesn’t touch upon too many parts of an organisation. A so called low surface area.

Now, my question is this: are enterprise grade network and systems management applications low surface area or high surface area?

One of the odd things about the three new wave players is that, of the three, only one Hyperic supports Windows natively.

The lack of native Windows support in the other two Zenoss/Groundwork seems like quite an oversight. It will be interesting to see whether the lack of native Windows support hinders their adoption. I’d be surprised if it doesn’t.

Zenoss have produced a nice virtual machine for VMWare. Kudos to them for that. But, it is just a fig leaf for their lack of native Windows support. Scrape underneath the virtual machine and it’s Linux hiding underneath. A lot of Windows admins may not fancy learning Linux.

A bunch of venture funded network management start-ups are storming the enterprise space with pockets full of venture capital money.

The new wave comprise: Hyperic, Zenoss and Groundwork.

What ties them all together? All of the tools are open source, but that isn’t new in network management. Projects like Nagios, OpenNMS as well as a raft of others have been around for a decade or so. What’s new is the combination of open source products and the level of funding going into the new players.