Sometimes you feel like a NUT

Thus open source provides an opportunity, and OpenGear is rushing toward it.

By supporting NUT, and assuring customers it can support whatever is in its data centers, OpenGear is now able to work with the top power management vendors, like Eaton. The two announced a partnership to deliver power management with NUT today.

I chatted about this with founder Bob Waldie, who is based in Australia. 

"We provide a vendor agnostic tool that lets you manage a fragmented environment," he said. "Few data centers have everything from one vendor. Few are all HP or all Windows. Most use products from a variety of vendors.

"This lets you shut down servers when the load is low to save power. Given the cost of power that's important.

"It is complex to manage a multi-vendor environment. Every vendor provides good tools for their own appliances. Few cross proprietary boundaries.

"If you're big you can manage that extra piece of complexity, but for a mid-sized vendor, with 100-1000 servers, they need simple tools with a consistent interface." This is what NUT delivers.

It's a key open source advantage, this ability to technically negotiate among vendors in a way that advantages all. Along with some clever third parties.