Oculan offers low-cost server mgmt.

System and network management vendor Oculan this week is adding upgrades to its all-in-one appliance to help users manage a range of Microsoft server software and some non-Microsoft platforms.

With the introduction of the 5.0 versions of Oculan's 100 and 250 appliances, the company has added support for Exchange 2003 and 2000, Active Directory, Terminal Services and SQL Server 2002. Support for SQL Server 7.0 is in final testing and is expected to ship with the new Oculan appliances.

Oculan also has added support via the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) for Linux, Novell and IBM's iSeries. Both the Microsoft and non-Microsoft platforms are managed through one interface.

"The biggest addition is the non-Microsoft awareness," says Jim Lyon, IT analyst for Integrits, a service provider in San Diego. "Now we can go and detect non-Microsoft workstations and collect true SNMP traps from the enterprise."

Lyon says he researched management tools from Microsoft, namely Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) and System Management Server, but that they were too costly for his smaller company. Also, those tools don't support non-Microsoft platforms. Oculan says its appliance is targeted at managing 1,000 seats or fewer.

Microsoft recognizes that need and earlier this year announced MOM Express, which is aimed at smaller customers with less-sophisticated management needs.

"Microsoft is taking the message out there that users need management, but they've missed ease of use, ease of deployment," says Shane O'Donnell, CTO and vice president for Oculan.

The Oculan 100 and 250 are plug-and-play appliances that combine network, systems and desktop management with intrusion detection, vulnerability assessment, asset management and bandwidth analysis. The appliance also supplies network performance reports along with notifications and alerts of suspect events.

For example, the appliance reports on such issues as user connections, wait times and hit ratios for SQL Server. In Active Directory, the Oculan appliance shows performance matrix such as total queries and responses per second and state information on replication and DNS services. For Exchange, users can get information such as messages sent and received per minute, queue sizes and average delivery time.

Two new features, an Executive View and a Network Report Card, provide data on network security and performance.

Oculan supports the additional Microsoft platforms using Microsoft's Windows Management Instrumentation, an API that lets systems and network devices be configured and managed.

The Oculan 100 costs about $5,000 and supports up to 10 servers, 10 infrastructure devices and 100 desktops. The 250 costs about $10,000 and supports up to 25 servers, 25 infrastructure devices and 250 desktops.