ZoNIX shares some important open source components that can help in building a robust, secured and cost effective IT infrastructure in BenefIT Magazine, April 2009 edition.

Building A Robust Open Source IT Infrastructure

In hard times, businesses do not wish to inflate their IT budgets, yet want better technology in place to automate their operations. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) fills this gap by aligning technology with a limited IT budget. Here are some important components that can help you build a robust, secured and cost effective IT infrastructure that’s completely based upon open source solutions.

People, processes and technology are the three core components of a business. Where the right people are in place and processes have been developed, technology needs to be applied to keep the processes on track and help achieve the objectives of the organisation. People without technology are like mere unarmed warriors in the battlefield. At the same time, adopting technology just to keep up with a trend is not a healthy strategy for an organisation. The right processes developed on the basis of a clearly articulated strategy and backed by the effective use of technology makes it much easier to achieve organization goals. There are no prizes for guessing who will win a war if one side has nuclear weapons, while the other merely a huge army.

In a similar way, striving to stay ahead in the competition makes it necessary to adopt better technology Technology equips the work force with better tools that help them deliver better performance and also, help the management to take informed decisions. Informed decisions can only be made with the help of accurate statistics and past trends. This is something that otherwise cannot be monitored or controlled. Often, technology is neglected due to the cost factor, which in turn, affects the company’s overall performance, at a much higher cost. On the other side, the information systems team keeps looking for approvals for bigger budgets so that hardware with better configurations, licenses for tools and more devices can be bought. This would equip the firm with the best technology to overcome various IT challenges. But in today’s tough economic conditions, it becomes challenging for companies to release extra funds when they are already working on cost cutting strategies. It appears to be a paradoxical situation where a company demands better technology but wants it without inflating the IT budget.

FOSS bridges the gap of technology and low budget

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) fills this gap by aligning the technology with limited IT budgets. The following sections cover a few key open source components to build a robust, secured and cost effective IT infrastructure.

Unified threat management

Right at the network perimeter, we typically look at features like a robust firewall to protect the network from external threats; remote network access with VPN (virtual private network) to allow employees or clients access to local network resources; allowing/blocking websites on a per user or group basis and gateway level anti-virus software to protect from viruses that get downloaded to the end-user’s machine. Other items on the systems administrator’s wish list are intrusion detection systems to detect intrusions entering in and leaving the network; bandwidth monitoring to keep a track on bandwidth usage; reports of the users’ Internet activities; Web based management consoles, etc. Such a comprehensive approach is known as UTM (unified threat management). Depending upon the entry level to mid-level versions, the cost of commercial UTM ranges from Rs 1—5 lakhs. But you could use powerful open source UTMs like Endian and Untangle, for free.

Enterprise Mailing

Retaining high uptime for a messaging system with minimal spam is still a challenge for many organizations. Rather than spending a lot of money on commercial solutions like Microsoft Exchange or Dominos, open source mailing systems can be used. Spam fighting capabilities in open source software are exceptionally good and comes at no cost.

Network Monitoring System

Network monitoring tools are highly essential for an organization to function proactively rather than merely reacting to a problem that has already led to losses. There are a few impressive open source network monitoring tools like Nagios, Groundwork, OpenNMS, Zabbix, etc. Such tools can offer a bird’s eye view on the availability of servers, the underlying services, performance data on CPUs, memory, number of processes, hard disks and IM. SMS or e-mail alerts for when a preset thresh hold is crossed, etc.

Domain Controller

Moving inside the perimeter, tasks like: user provisioning, controlling access rights and managing the network becomes far easier if a centralized authentication mechanism is well in place. This again can be implemented using an open source domain controller solution.

Centralized Backup Management

Many organizations still haven’t defined regular back-up procedures because commercial back-up management solutions are expensive. In such scenarios, back-up management is done manually, which is not a foolproof method of managing the information assets of a company. There are a couple of open source solutions available, like Amanda and Baculla, that offer backup support to heterogeneous networks consisting of Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris, etc.

Storage

Centralized storage is yet another highly expensive system. Companies look for solutions like SAN (storage area network) and NAS (network attached storage) but then avoid procuring these due to the high burden on their pockets. FreeNAS is an open source NAS solution that can fill their requirements at no cost.

Virtualization

Multiple systems can be consolidated onto a single physical server to reduce complexity and save power and management overheads. In virtualization, one host operating system with virtualization software installed can run the rest of the operating systems on top of it, to make it appear as a separate system. Open source virtualization solutions like Xen help an organization to build a green IT environment in their network.

PBX and Chat Server

Instead of putting aside a hefty amount to buy hardware or a commercial PBX, Asterisk can be used to deploy an open source IP PBX. “Asterisk is the world’s leading open source PBXi, telephony engine, and telephony applications toolkit. Offering flexibility unheard of in the world of proprietary communications, Asterisk empowers developers and integrators to create advanced communication solutions…for free,” says the Asterisk website. You can have a number of PBX features with Asterisk (which is software-based) that are at times missing from traditional hardware-based solutions. Similarly, an open source chat server can be deployed as a corporate chat server along with Asterisk to harness the phone and chat communication. You can block direct connections to Yahoo and MSN servers from messengers installed on end user machines and can configure transport for Yahoo and MSN in the local chat server with logging in enabled. This can help you with better monitoring capabilities to track down the proprietary information traveling over instant messengers.

Power Booster Applications

Along with IT solutions, there are lots of open source applications that can help an organisation lay down better controls and to enhance performance. A few of them are mentioned in the table:

Ticketing System

Once the core IT systems have been deployed, there is a need for SLA (Service Level Agreement) management and the IT team of an organization needs to follow a process oriented approach to solve operational and technical issues. SLA management can only be done if all problems and incidents are tracked using some centralized ticketing system. OTRS, osTicket and Mantis are few of the open source software solutions that could be used as ticket management systems. All users of an application can submit their problems via a Web-based ticket management system that can be acted upon by IT staff.

Other Network Servers

There are many more open source solutions available to help implement almost anything that an IT infrastructure needs—DNS servers, FTP servers, corporate chat server, Web servers, application servers, DHCP servers, mailing list managers to exchange e-mail among a group of users, version control systems to preserve files and their structure with proper ‘last updated’ information stored in an incremental manner, database servers and many more.

Along with the free and community editions, there are a couple of solutions from the above list that are also available for a very nominal fee as commercial solutions. But if an organisation already has the in-house open source talent to configure the community solutions then all the technology comes at no cost. Even if a company has to hire a third party open source consultant to do the job, the cost of open source solutions will still be as low as 1/10th the commercial solutions’ cost. Thus, cost is not a barrier any more to adopting better technology and unleashing the power of FOSS solutions. This creates a level playing field for small and mid-sized organisations wherein they can also leverage the latest IT tools and technology.