Computer Associates yesterday began shipping its first implementation of the neural network technology, which it has been promising to do since last April.
The technology is used in Neugents, software agents that reside on servers or workstations. The neural network capabilities of the agents make them able to recognize the behavior patterns of an individual system. In just a few weeks the agents are able to learn what the normal behavior is of a particular system.
Using this behavior pattern as a guideline, the agent can make predictions in regards to when the system might fail. The Neugent focuses on performance, so it can predict when a system will experience performance problems and in response it will generate an alert. Future agents will help in areas such as asset management, security administration, storage utilization and capacity planning.
Neugents are used in conjunction with CA's Unicenter The Next Generation, but they are also one of three major ingredients of the next version of Unicenter The Next Dimension (TND). The other elements include a time dimension for viewing network and system status at different points in time, and a user interface to illustrate that dimension. TND is scheduled to ship in full next year.
The Neugents are available for Windows NT servers, starting at $2,000.
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