Covalent open source application virtualization
Recently I had a chance to speak with two folks from Covalent Technologies, Mark Brewer, CEO, and Charlie Purdom, VP of Marketing. It was a wonderful chance to catch up with what the company is doing now. I've spoken with these gentleman over the years as the company searched for a business model that worked. They're now using a pure-play open source model, that is the software is freely available for download, the software is protected using a well-accepted open source license and the company's revenues come from a well thought out subscription model for service and support.
The company offers full commercial levels of support for many important open source tools including the following:
- Apache HTTP Web Server
- Apache Tomcat J2SE Server
- Apache Axis Web Services Framework
- Apache Geronimo J2EE Container
- Apache Roller Blog Server
- Apache Modules - mod_ftp, mod_snmp, mod_proxy, mod_ssl, mod_perl, and others
Why mention them here? The combination of these tools is often used to create a highly available, manageable, responsive and agile environment for Web based applications. Although not packaged or presented as such, Covalent's technology, when properly used, offers many of the benefits of application virtualization including load balancing, application failover and the like. When used with products from other suppliers, such as Hyperic, these tools can be a very cost-effective way for organizations to gain the benefits of virtualization at this level.
The most recent figures (July 2007) from Netcraft =show that Apache is the web server software found on over 50% of sites observed.
Do you use these open source tools to create a virtualized environment? Why did you choose this approach rather than using someone else's application framework?