As a project manager of Windows NT management services at Nabisco, Rich Burton has been lucky enough to be among the first to experience firsthand what a difference the Common Information Model (CIM) can make in systems management.
Virtually all of the products Burton uses for system management at the Parsippany, N.J., food manufacturer support CIM or soon will. The products include Tivoli Enterprise, NetIQ's AppManager Suite and Microsoft's Systems Management Server (SMS) 2.0.
So what does all this mean for Nabisco's systems administrators?
For one thing, the CIM-compliant SMS 2.0 gives systems administrators a much richer set of attributes that they can use to determine which desktops or servers get software updates. "With 1.2, we were always delivering to a machine with a unique ID that SMS generated," Burton says. "Now we can utilize properties like User ID, or group membership or system attributes to target software updates. It makes delivery much easier and faster."
Plus, Burton's group can extend the CIM schemas provided in SMS 2.0 to describe additional classes, resources or components, he says. For example, Burton is looking at extending the software inventory schemas to describe attributes specific to Nabisco's applications, such as the Dynamic Link Library version number or an application's last time of use.
Burton is also preparing to exploit the extended NT server monitoring capabilities that NetIQ's AppManager Suite provides via CIM. The performance management platform uses CIM, as well as other types of management agents such as SNMP, to provide proactive monitoring and the ability to take corrective action before thresholds are exceeded.
Is this enough to sell Burton on CIM? Just ask him.
"When I talk about management with vendors now, one of the first questions I ask is, 'What are your plans for CIM?' " Burton says. "A lot of them say, 'What's that?' "
RELATED LINKS
The Common Information Model is already paying dividends, but more vendors need to get on board. Network World, 6/21/99.
