InformationWeek

Taking Control Of The Network

Platform providers offer tools that allow managers to zero in on the desktop and the needs of the end user. A host of bottom-line benefits are promised, as well as a better integrated management approach.

By Sharyn Sears Moshavi
Issue Date: January 2, 1995

Network management has always been hot; in 1995 it'll be scorching. Year after year, technology managers charged with keeping electronic pulses flowing through the corporate body have clamored for more sophisticated network tools. Now they are getting more powerful and flexible tools. And they're coming just in time. Increasingly, netwo rk managers are being asked to monitor and manage desktops as well as the network.

The options that will be brought out this year will enable managers to better control and enhance the crucial computing and communications resources of the enterprise. The big three network management platforms--IBM's NetView, Hewlett-Packard's OpenView, and SunSoft's SunNet Manager--will get features to extend their reach into the enterprise. And two desktop giants--Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc.--will offer their approaches to systems and network management.

The focus is on monitoring and servicing the desktop, and the new products offer users more management options. Many consolidate systems and network management, and also provide ways to manage software metering and licensing. Vendors promise bottom-line benefits: fewer staff hours spent on routine tasks, reduced levels of expertise needed to manage the desktop, and tools to filter the information overload that often hampers productivity. In addition, the management systems should produce smarter help desks, faster resolution of crises, and more efficient deployment of applications to users.

A Change In Focus
"Networking no longer focuses on just connectivity of components," says Joe Matibog, senior product manager with SunSoft in Mountain View, Calif. "The trend is toward process management and a definition of network performance in terms of throughput, response time to requests, and the availability of services."

An understanding of the user is what Microsoft, the newest player to enter the market, hopes to offer. Microsoft has introduced Systems Management Server (SMS), which works with Digital Equipment's PolyCenter, HP's OpenView, and IBM's NetView/6000 and mainframe management consoles.

"The systems management field is already well established," says Dwight Krossa, group product manager for Microsoft's Back Office products. "But they are not generally designed to manage PCs."

A Step Beyond
Microsoft's SMS goe s a step beyond most current products, analysts say. "Until recently, we had the enterprise tools and the platform-specific tools," says Carter Lesher, research director for information technology management in the Santa Clara, Calif., office of the Gartner Group Inc. consultancy. "Now we are seeing cross-platform tools. In 1995, we'll see more interaction between SMS-type tools and the enterprise."

Microsoft's SMS is intended to scale to tens of thousands of PCs and to work with enterprise management tools such as the simplified network management protocol (SNMP) to provide a complete view of the enterprise network from a single console.

SMS can also inventory the desktop and distribute software, Microsoft's Krossa says. And it automates data gathering to support quicker problem identification and fixes, easier software distribution and monitoring, and, ultimately, a richer repository of user and system data.

"SMS gathers data such as: How many machines are out there? Which operating systems are the y running? What version? Which applications are people using? How much memory and disk space is available? What is the size of their mail- message file?" says Krossa.

SMS has extensive monitoring functionality for remote network control. Darren Kammer, a systems analyst and SMS team leader at Texas Instruments Inc.'s information systems and services organization in Plano, Texas, says 18 months of testing shows that SMS has a lot to offer.

"Our help-desk people look forward to the remote file transfer capabilities, and to having a view of the user's desktop at their fingertips," says Kammer. "They won't have to ask users what their systems looks like. And our NT people can deploy software upgrades to servers automatically, while our network management group can integrate SMS with our Cabletron hubs," he says.

SMS will enable network managers at TI to monitor servers and workstations and gather more remote datathan ever before, adds Kammer. He warns that programming expertise is needed to fully impleme nt SMS, but says it is easy to use once installed. After initial installation, Kammer says, "software distribution is almost trivial."

Help For The Roving Administrator
Another new player is Novell, the local area networking leader. Last October, Novell introduced NetWare Distributed Management Services (NDMS), which allows a manager to click on a user's workstation and see physical information such as how the workstation is configured, and user information such as access privileges, according to Steve Dauber, product line manager for management products at Novell. And, because network administrators spend much of their days roving, NDMS gives them management access from anywhere on the network. "If an administrator is in building 5 at the time his pager goes off, he doesn't need to hike back to building 1 to sit at his own workstation," says Dauber.

"The way people are managing networks is changing because the way people are using networks is changing," Dauber says. "The network m anager needs to be able to view the network the same way the user does, and the user doesn't generally see the internetwork."

The established market leaders aren't standing still while Microsoft and Novell invade their turf. In December, SunSoft began shipping Project Encompass, a single-license, multiuser management platform that offers a sophisticated alarm and event correlation system designed to adjust to changing network conditions. The goal is to deliver only the most critical information to managers during a serious network event. The result is that low-level alarms that provide information under normal conditions are suppressed, eliminating the flow of information not critical to solving the problem at hand, says SunSoft's Matibog.

Kieth Finnie, network products manager for BC Systems, an IS services provider in Victoria, British Columbia, likes Project Encompass' sophisticated alarm system. "Currently, when a major link goes down, the alarm system is useless for an hour," he says.

Finnie, a n early user of Project Encompass, cites ease-of-use as an area where return-on-investment might be reaped. "It will reduce the level of expertise needed by our people, because less interpretation is required," he says.

Several new offerings aim to automate system configuration. HP, for example, introduced the AdminCenter under its OpenView platform in November. AdminCenter is billed as "configuration and change management" software, which under OpenView automates configuration of new systems, servers, and software, and provides a single view for an administrator's entire management domain, according to Gordon MacKinney, OpenView program manager for HP in Fort Collins, Colo.

Systems vendors such as HP provide frameworks intended to encourage vendors and other third parties to create components that can be managed by the systems platform. "We are going to see some of the boundaries go down between what are traditionally considered separate tools," says MacKinney. "We are aligning our solutions around ke y processes to help make objects manageable."

And to keep the enterprise humming.

Comments on this story?