NASHVILLE - The conference may have been called Planet Tivoli, but the host company emphasized that its NetView net management system cannot exist in its own little world.
Tivoli revealed plans to its 1,800 guests to improve NetView by adding policy, Web and Common Information Model (CIM) capabilities that will enable the software to work better with other management systems.
Tivoli, which is owned by IBM, also said it will deliver a version of its Tivoli Manager systems management product that runs on IBM mainframes.
The NetView product upgrades, which will appear over the next 12 months, should better position Tivoli's software vs. the plethora of new management tools that have rolled out in recent months from established players and newcomers.
Tivoli will ensure that NetView, as well as the company's systems management tools, can easily swap data with other management tools by supporting CIM, an emerging Distributed Management Task Force standard for information exchange.
It will be easier to get third-party vendors to integrate their products with Tivoli tools via the emerging standard than to get them to write to NetView's proprietary APIs, says Leo Cole, director of network management at Tivoli.
CIM will also give Tivoli a way to further integrate its own products, bringing together data from NetView and Tivoli's systems management tools. Rival Hewlett-Packard is using CIM in a similar fashion for its management tools (NW, April 19, page 1).
Tivoli also has plans to forge tighter links between NetView and other vendors' policy management servers.
Policy-based management is an emerging concept that helps managers determine which applications or users get access to network bandwidth and other resources, and these decisions are enforced in network hardware. But Cole says policy management is headed in the wrong direction.
"The way policy-based management is positioned today is a train wreck waiting to happen" because all the policy servers that have been announced are aimed at the NOC, Cole says. The people in the NOC are not the people who should make decisions about which applications and departments get top priority, he says.
NetView won't communicate policies directly to network devices. Instead, managers responsible for applications will be able to set policies through Tivoli software and pass them on to various policy servers in NOCs. "We will allow you to gain control over what is going to be chaos in the policy management market," Cole says.
Tivoli also discussed the next distributed version of NetView, due out at year-end. This version will be able to more flexibly and accurately discover a network topology and show the status of the devices within that topology.
Because NetView currently isn't able to account for geography or the importance of certain devices when it performs autodiscovery, many large users enter their network topologies by hand, says Jim Carey, development manager for the distributed version of NetView. The next NetView version will let users build a text file detailing where certain address ranges are physically located. NetView will examine the file as it builds a network topology map.
The new version will also use SNMP polling in addition to ping to find out the status of network devices. The ping utility is limited because it will show devices as being in critical condition if it can't route to them. Using SNMP requests, NetView can display the true status of the devices, Carey says.
NetView will also be getting a new interface that can launch Web-based management interfaces embedded in many network devices today.
This feature appeals to Bengt-Olof Bloom, a network engineer with the Swedish bank SEB, who now manages devices separately through their Web interfaces. "This might be a way to get a focal point," he says.
Tivoli also promised to improve its management for ATM networks, though few details were available. Bloom says such a move is overdue. He pointed out that IBM has a separate management system for ATM and that he would like to see that system integrated with NetView.
On the systems management side, Tivoli is preparing Tivoli Manager on OS/390, says Martin Neath, executive vice president at Tivoli. Today, Tivoli has an agent available to manage mainframes along with the rest of an enterprise, but the software to be announced next month will make it possible to use the mainframe as the Tivoli server to manage an enterprise.
Tivoli is bringing its management framework to the OS/390 platform so that network managers can run software distribution, inventory, security and systems monitoring from there. The software will collect information about applications on the mainframe to determine how outages might affect certain applications, to display the resources used by a business process and to help track down problems. Tivoli is licensing some of the code to create the product under an OEM arrangement with Accessible Software, Neath says.
RELATED LINKS
Tivoli everywhere, Gerstner says
Tivoli management agents will find their way into many different computing devices, starting with IBM servers next month, according to IBM Chairman and CEO Lou Gerstner. Network World Fusion, 5/20/99
Users impart wisdom at Tivoli conference
In some of the most heavily attended sessions at the Planet Tivoli conference, large users shared their insights into the problems and successes. Network World Fusion, 5/20/99.
Tivoli Decision Support Discovery
Overview from Tivoli.
Network World Fusion Focus on Network and Systems Management
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