Easing Linux enterprise integration

On the eve of this week’s LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, several companies offered prebuilt open source solutions designed to ease integration migraines. From small startups to large vendors such as Novell, companies are building momentum toward preconfiguring open source products.

Novell said it is now offering a validated high-performance computing offering that weds its Suse Linux Enterprise Server with Hewlett-Packard’s BladeSystem. The companies said the package will make it easier to deploy clustered Linux-based servers.

Open source startups Greenplum, JasperSoft and Kinetic Networks all banded together last week to offer a BI-reporting, data-warehousing, and ETL (extraction, transformation and loading) triptych, while ActiveGrid set its flagship prebuilt LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl/PHP/Python) offerings to sail. Also, SourceLabs announced what it calls the SASH Stack for Java.

“Prepackaged solutions make open source much more palatable to a much larger percentage of the market,” said Anne Thomas Manes, an analyst at Burton Group. “Many companies don’t have the technical expertise and staff to manage ‘raw’ open source projects.”

Greenplum integrated its Bizgres open source data warehouse with Jasper Reports, JasperSoft’s front-end business intelligence reporting tool, and KETL, Kinetic Network’s ETL software. The result: an open source environment in which customers get information out of their data warehouse, run analytics on that data, and, ultimately, deliver it to users in the form of BI reports.

Cost and ease-of-use are two of the main factors that attracted Pfizer’s Global Pharmaceutical Group to use ActiveGrid’s Enterprise LAMP, said Martin Brodbeck, director of the global applications architecture group within the Pfizer unit.

The fact that it comes packaged “makes it easier for the LAMP stack to be a supportable platform within our enterprise,” Brodbeck added, because it “helps figure out how all the pieces fit together.”

ActiveGrid announced the Versions 1.0 of Application Builder and LAMP Application Server. Application Builder is a RAD (rapid application development) environment, and the LAMP Application Server acts as the deployment platform.

Also last week, SourceLabs announced the SASH Stack for Java. SASH is the acronym for the open source application frameworks (Apache Struts, Apache Axis, Spring Framework, and Hibernate) that pull the frameworks together into a tested and supported stack for building enterprise-class Web applications.