Status Report on the RRDtool OSS Project
========================================
Author:  Tobias Oetiker
Date:    2008-11-19
$Id$


Accomplishments
---------------

* RRDtool 1.4

  * After a long rc period. The new major version of RRDtool has been
    released in October.  It features RRDcached.

  * RRDcached is a corner stone in the quest for even better performance. It
    works by caching updates and then applying them in bulk to the
    individual rrd files. This cuts away a lot of the overhead associated
    with accessing RRD files for individual updates.

    RRDcached was the first standalone component of RRDtool, developed
    without code contributions from me. It is based on a concept paper that
    has been sitting in the rrdtool wiki for quite some time and lots of
    ideas from the two main developers Florian Forster and Kevin Brintnall.

    For me this caused a shift towards more work on the developers
    mailing list and in integrating patches.

  * A host of other smaller features was also added in the 1.4 release, like
    massively improved memory efficiency for restore operations, additional
    graphing functions and the ability to directly pull data into graphs
    from a classical database via libdbi.

* RRDtool 1.3.x was until October the current release. It saw several
  revisions, mostly for bug fixes and performance improvements.

Other Ongoing Activities
------------------------

* Code Maintenance: mails on the mailing-lists and directly to me
  indicate compatibility issues or suggest little changes. These are
  often implemented immediately.

* Thanks to a developer account on the opencsw.org infrastructure I am now
  in a position to debug Solaris issues directly and have done so for the
  1.4 release.

* Mailing-list, Web-server, Trac maintenance. The on-line resources
  for RRDtool are kept up-to-date, in working order and spam free.

* Two tutorials on RRDtool at LISA 2009 (conference on
  Large Installation System Administration, Nov 2009, Baltimore, U.S.)

Planned Activities
------------------

* Continued support for 1.2.x, 1.3.x 

* Development of RRDtool 1.5

  The major feature of 1.5 will be the portable data format that allows to
  read and write RRD files across all platforms where RRDtool is supported.
  Preliminary information about this feature can be found in

    http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool-trac/wiki/PortableRrdFormat

  For RRDcached an authentication, authorization and encryption facility is
  envisioned. Allowing to use RRDcacheds abilities for remote logging in a
  wider network context.

  Eventually RRDcached should provide full RRDtool functionality for remote
  access, including graph and updatev functions.

Sponsorship 2010
----------------

The 2010 sponsorship program has been setup. If you have not signed up
yet, I would be thrilled to have you back as sponsor for the next year.
Please get in touch.

In 2009, RRDtool has been sponsored by these companies:

Gold Sponsors: 

* GroundWork Open Source - IT Monitoring & Network Solutions
  www.groundworkopensource.com

* ZenOSS - Open Source Enterprise Monitoring
  www.zenoss.com

Silver Sponsors:

* Digicomp Academy AG         www.digicomp.ch
* Openlane Inc.               www.openlane.com
* terreActive AG              www.terreactive.ch
* Host Europe                 www.hosteurope.de
* Sidarion                    www.sidarion.ch
* Contego Solutions LLC       www.contego.net 
* Hitflip Media Trading GmbH  www.hitflip.de
* Reflected Networks, Inc     www.reflected.net
* Chinavasion Wholesale Ltd   www.chinavasion.com

--
Tobi Oetiker, Olten, Switzerland
2009-11-19