Net/Systems Management /

Integrating management consoles and products

By Barb Goldworm
Network World Network Systems Management Newsletter, 02/02/00

In today's e-business environment, companies rely and compete on the strength of their systems and network infrastructure. To ensure high availability and acceptable performance, and deliver consistent service, IT organizations have invested heavily in management tools. As a result, these products have burgeoned over the past decade, so that today hundreds of products and platforms are offered to manage all aspects of business networked systems.

Unfortunately, most of these tools exist independently of one another. They report the status of specific vendor devices and systems, monitor only certain types of network links, collect data from proprietary sources, and focus on specific isolated views of management. There are dozens of tools used in every data center/network operations center (NOC), with a flood of data and a lack of useful information.

Users have hoped for years that management vendors would standardize, and begin to integrate. Unfortunately, while many vendors paid lip service to sharing management information across platforms, element management systems and task-specific applications, little has come of the effort. Perhaps too many of the players still had market domination, not cooperation, in mind and wanted to keep competitors out of the loop. A level playing field is good for users, but not necessarily good for the leading product vendors.

The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) has made great strides in developing standards that have been agreed to (at least in principle) by the major players in network and systems management. With the design of a Common Information Model (CIM) and a Web-based Management architecture, this multivendor standards organization is paving the way to shared management information systems of the future.
Changes of this scale, however, are slow in coming. Many vendors are interested in adopting CIM to allow their products to manage other products, but these same vendors are slower to make their products manageable through CIM. Exclusionary habits are hard to break. Products are entrenched, along with the ways that businesses use them. DMTF participants have a vision of the future to work towards and a roadmap to get there, but it takes time to build the road.

So what are the options in the meantime? One possibility is a product from Managed Objects called Formula, which consolidates management information from multiple disparate packages and platforms, and creates useful business information from those sources. Formula provides many of the benefits that CIM aims to provide (once it's fully supported), and does it with products on the market today.

Formula uses the standard Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) to access information from numerous management products, including BMC Patrol and BMC Command Post, Computer Associates Unicenter, Hewlett-Packard OpenView, Micromuse Netcool/Omnibus, Spectrum, Tivoli NetView and Tivoli Enterprise Console. Formula accesses the databases of these products using Formula adapters and translates the information on the fly eliminating the need to recreate the information into a separate database. In addition, the communication is bidirectional, allowing Formula to send commands to other platforms to be executed.

As the name Managed Objects would imply, Formula is based on an object-oriented design. As a member of the DMTF, Managed Objects used CIM as a reference point in creating Formula. A comparison of their architectures reveals the similarities in approach that make both ideal solutions to the glut of management data.
Formula uses an object wrapper to query and retrieve information. This approach allows Formula to work with any type of management system that supports a metadata schema. Similarly, CIM includes a data model and schema that together create a context for any type of management information.

Continuing on the CIM path, Managed Objects has recently announced the Formula CIM Object Manager, which will allow integration with any management product that supports CIM. This gives users a migration path for the future, while providing benefits today. The Formula CIM Object Manager is planned for delivery sometime around April of this year, according to Managed Objects.

The DMTF continues to work with large and small management vendors to expand the role of CIM in helping users move towards integrated management solutions. In the long run, CIM holds great promise. In the short term, products such as Managed Objects' Formula can bridge the gap.