Getting network management ready for Year 2000

First in a four-part series.

Network and systems management has always been about heading off disaster. But network managers will need to prevent a Year 2000induced disaster in their management software itself.

The good news is the vast majority of vendors claim the management software they are selling now is ready for the infamous date change - the current versions of that software, at least. If you've been procrastinating an upgrade to a new version for a couple of years, now is the time to check with your vendor and get the current revision if need be.

Current versions of the major network management platforms are certified by the vendors as Y2K-compliant. This includes Tivoli's NetView, Cabletron's Spectrum and Hewlett-Packard's Network Node Manager (NNM), the heart of the OpenView management software set. Computer Associates' Unicenter TNG requires a patch.

"All of the major solutions providers have been pretty careful," says Richard Ptak, vice president of systems and application management at the Hurwitz Group in Framingham, Mass. And new, smaller vendors are well aware of the Y2K problem and have probably solved it from the beginning, he adds.

The main worry, then, is older software. Some management software vendors offer maintenance contracts under which they periodically send updates of their software to users. Ross Systems, for instance, for two years has used software from Proactive Networks, which sends Ross quarterly upgrades.

Proactive has assured the company that any Y2K-related problems have been fixed in those updates, says Hank Waash, director of worldwide operations at Ross, a business software company in Redwood City, Calif. "I'm taking their word for it," he says.

In other cases, getting management software to be Y2K-compliant may be just a matter of downloading a patch from a vendor's Web site. Systems integrator Forsythe Technology uses many of HP's management products to remotely monitor its customers' enterprise networks.

Most of HP's management software requires a patch or an upgrade to a current version to be compliant, but getting and installing those patches is relatively painless, says Dan Gallagher, director of enterprise systems management services at Forsythe in Skokie, Ill.

"Because we're a production environment, we've done the upgrades during periods of off-use," Gallagher says. Forsythe also does its own verification to ensure the software can handle the date change.

Anyone who has kept his network management software up to date is probably in good shape, says Elizabeth Rainge, research manager for network management at International Data Corp. in Framingham, Mass. "In networking, there's been so much change and so much overhaul that people have updated things as they go," she says.

For those who haven't kept up to date - and you know who you are - now is the time to get the upgrade or patch. Cabletron requires an upgrade to Version 5.0 of its Spectrum network management platform in order to be compliant. HP says Version 4.X and later of NNM are Y2K-compliant. Its recommendation for users running Version 3.31 or earlier is to upgrade to 4.11 and apply a patch.

Device management software from network hardware vendors will also need to be examined. Nortel Networks recommends users upgrade to Y2K-compliant versions of Optivity. And 3Com has declared that old versions of its Transcend software are obsolete and therefore won't be made compliant.

But Y2K support in one product from a vendor, even a key product such as NNM, doesn't mean the rest of that vendor's products are ready. HP's Desktop Administrator is OK, for example, but IT/Administration and IT/Operations require an upgrade to Version A.03.X or later.

If a vendor's products have been discontinued, you may be out of luck. Network Associates says most of its products are Y2K-compliant, but it also lists discontinued products that won't be made compliant, including Safe & Sound, Netroom, Headroom, Popup Genie and Multimedia Cloaking.

Some products may have dependencies on nonmanagement pieces, as well. HP's advice for users of its server management software, ManageX, is to upgrade to Windows NT 4.

Others just aren't done yet. Network Associates' Reporter line of products isn't compliant, and it will be replaced by June 30, according to the company. But these cases are rare in the network management area.

So how can network managers sift through all this information? The main thing to do is to take an inventory of all the management software and check what the vendors say about the software being used. This includes software agents that run on various platforms in the enterprise and report back to the management applications. Even those agents may deal with date information.

One large utility company that asked not to be identified has found it uses a dozen separate management products. These include a platform, various device managers for network hardware, performance management software, application management software and a protocol analyzer. At this point, the company has completed most of its testing of these software tools, but it still needs to apply some patches.

As long as the management software is compliant, it should be able to help users track down problems with other applications when the date changes to 2000, Ptak says. The applications will break or act strangely, and a good management application should be able to catch those errors and alert a manager, he says.

Those who are still nervous can request someone to go to their site for the time just before and just after Jan. 1, 2000. CA says it will offer its users someone to stay on site and serve as a point of contact to track down glitches caused by the Y2K bug.

Gallagher says he'll watch his own network during the changeover. "As long as I'm in the building here with my generators and backup power, I won't be concerned," he says. "I'll probably get a bag of chips and some water, and wait."