News

Management Framework Vendors Gear up for W2K

• By Scott Bekker
• 02/15/2000

Tivoli Systems Inc. (www.tivoli.com) today announced a raft of products created for or re-directed at Windows 2000. Hewlett-Packard Co. (www.hp.com) bragged that Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) is using OpenView Express to manage 240 workstations and 10 servers in the hands-on pavilions on the show floor of the Windows 2000 Conference and Expo here. HP detailed support for Windows 2000 in its management products – HP TopTools, HP OpenView, HP Web JetAdmin, and its Manageability Consulting Services -- late last month.

Computer Associates Int’l Inc. (www.cai.com), which declared its line of comprehensive management framework products that includes Unicenter TNG, ARCserveIT and eTrust prepared for Windows 2000 earlier this month, today unveiled the availability of ARCserveIT for Windows 2000. The backup software is a free upgrade for users of ARCserveIT 6.5 or 6.6x.

Tivoli, an IBM Corp. (www.ibm.com) company, was the only one of the three vendors to lay out a full Windows 2000 strategy at the Windows 2000 Conference and Expo here, where Microsoft will formally launch the product Thursday. “We did some customers studies,” says Chris Justice, a Tivoli product manager. “We tried to position our products on the most common pains for deploying Windows 2000.

“Since Active Directory is a network-centric architecture, the planning and performance analysis of your network resources is the primary point of concern. If that fails, then Active Directory can’t really be leveraged by your end users,” Justice says.

In advance of a Windows 2000 migration, Tivoli recommends use of Tivoli NetView, a network management product, to provide accurate information about the existing network and Tivoli Data Protection for Workgroups for backing up Windows NT machines so a rollback is possible if the migration turns sour.

Justice says Tivoli Distributed Monitoring for Windows 2000/NT was the company’s major focus for Windows 2000. Out-of-the-box knowledge guides help administrators centrally monitor system resources and automatically diagnose and resolve issues affecting application performance, eliminating manual scanning through extensive performance data to locate and fix system problems, according to Tivoli. The tool takes advantage of the Common Information Model (CIM) management standard.

Tivoli is also positioning its Service Desk and Remote Control tools as Windows 2000 solutions. “Some managers are taking the strategy that Windows 2000 still has a Start button so it doesn’t require any training,” Justice says. “Our customers expect an increased call load once Windows 2000 is deployed.”

All the Tivoli components are immediately available except for the distributed monitoring tool, which will be available in 90 days.

HP has similar recommendations for HP users planning a move to Windows 2000. The company recommended the use of TopTools management and reporting capabilities to produce a Windows 2000 Migration Report for HP Vectra corporate PCs, HP OmniBook notebook PCs, and HP Kayak PC Workstations.

While HP plans to make its hardware-specific TopTools management software and its HP Web JetAdmin software integrate with Windows 2000 in future versions, the HP OpenView framework family is Windows 2000 compatible now, according to HP. – Scott Bekker