San Francisco
Here we go again.
Five leading software and hardware vendors last week proposed a new
standards-based approach for network management - this time through a Web
browser.
The vendors - Cisco Systems, Inc., Compaq Computer Corp., Intel Corp.,
Microsoft Corp. and BMC Software, Inc. - say this latest net management
standards effort will result in a new breed of Web-based tools that will
reduce the complexity that will reduce the complexity and cost of
enterprise management. The Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) group has
the backing of about 70 other companies.
WBEM 'solves the integration problem and unleashes the creative
ability to do management applications,' said Ronnie Ward, vice president
of enterprise computing at Compaq. It takes the integration impetus off
management platforms, he said.
But history is not on the side of such ambitious management standards
initiatives, as anyone familiar with the Open Software Foundation, Inc.'s
(OSF) Distributed Management Environment or the Management Integration
Consortium knows. And this effort is wrought with some formidable
challenges, as well, including the following:
It lacks the blessing of Sun Microsystems, Inc., creator of the Java
programming language, which is increasingly being used for Internet and
Web-based management applets.
Some of the effort's backers do not appear to have their hearts
entirely in it.
As with other 'Net-related efforts, political and competitive
undercurrents are swirling.
It is big on concept and small on content; specifications still have
to be defined and activities have to be coordinated among more than 70
vendors and at least two standards groups.
'Who is going to do the work?' asked Joe Clabby, an analyst with
Aberdeen Group, Inc. in Boston. 'It's a nice architectural layout. But as
you put together an architecture, you want to figure out who is going to
take the action items to make it happen, and I couldn't find that.'
The WBEM concept
The WBEM concept defines three areas for standardization. One is a
HyperMedia Management Schema (HMMS), which is an extensible data model for
representing managed objects. Another is the HyperMedia Management Protocol
(HMMP), an HTTP-based protocol for communicating between management
services, applications and agents.
The third piece is the HyperMedia Object Manager (HMOM), a C++ object
broker that will pull together management data on behalf of management
applications. HMOM is based on Microsoft's OLE technology.
HMMS will be defined, maintained and updated by the Desktop Management
Task Force (DMTF). HMMP is being debated within the Internet Engineering
Task Force, and a reference implementation of HMOM will be placed in the
public domain.
Vendors expect WBEM-compliant products to hit the market next year.
Though the WBEM vendors said their plan embraces existing standards
such as Simple Network Management Protocol and the Desktop Management
Interface, interoperability with de-vices supporting these standards is not
guaranteed.
'We have to get the details right,' said Jeffrey Case, president of
SNMP Research, Inc. in Knoxville, Tenn., one of the 70 companies supporting
WBEM, and coauthor of the SNMP protocol. 'It's difficult for any five
companies this big to get anything done.'
This may be why users are cautious and even skeptical about WBEM.
'I give the marketing boys an 'A' for this,' said Frank Belland,
senior systems architect at Lockheed Martin in Orlando, Fla. 'How real is
the support? Why don't we go off and do another OSF DME?'
'I'm certainly not going to run and buy their first product,' said
Sean Blake, systems analyst for Eli Lilly Co. in Indianapolis. 'There
always seems to be two different standards, and none ever gets flushed out,
so the market decides what to buy.'
No one can blame Sun if WBEM doesnt fly or credit the company if it
does. Sun is keeping a safe distance from the effort while it determines
WBEM's effect on Java.
Differences between Java and WBEM exist in the user interface and in
implementation, said Brian Biles, director of Solstice product marketing
for SunSoft, Inc.
The WBEM browser interface is based on HTML; the Java user interface
is not. Also, WBEM im-plementations could hit interoperability snags if
deployed across different object models, Biles said. This is not the case
with Java, he claimed.
'We think [Java's] actually a better choice for doing something as
broadly heterogeneous as management,' Biles said.
Microsoft, however, believes Sun will change its tune.
'Sun has its own agenda, and eventually they'll come around because
this is very good,' said Bob Krueger, general manager for systems
management products at Microsoft.
But even some vendors that back WBEM are doing so cautiously. IBM's
Tivoli Systems, Inc. subsidiary, for example, will back HMMS insofar as it
progresses through the DMTF or becomes a de facto standard. HMMP, though,
is another matter.
'We're going to be in a more wait-and-see attitude on that one,'
said Chris Grafft, senior vice president of business development at Tivoli.
'We don't exactly understand the path that will take to becoming something
that would add value to existing protocols.'
Though the technical and installed-base challenges facing WBEM are
many, the political and competitive challenges that accompany any standards
effort may be the most daunting. Some of these companies just flat out do
not like each other.
