JCPenney, which has around 50,000 devices in its switched Ethernet environment and frame relay WAN that spans its 1,000-plus department stores, some 2,700 Eckerd pharmacy chains and other sites, relies on the usual arsenal of management tools--Hewlett-Packard Co. HP OpenView for monitoring the health of the devices, and vendor-specific tools like Cisco Systems' CiscoWorks and 3Com Corp.'s Transcend. But the retailer's biggest challenge is similar to those of other big companies with multiple management tools: The packages aren't fully integrated, so many configuration and software distribution tasks need to be done by hand.
"Most of the network management tools just don't scale for big networks," says Michael Davis, senior project manager for network technologies at JCPenney, Dallas. The tools typically are more well-suited for smaller jobs, usually less than 100 routers or switches, for instance. So it can take several days or weeks to complete a software upgrade on a switch. "All these tools have SNMP and telnet, but when you have the number of devices we have, they become difficult to manage," Davis says.
The retailer has written custom scripts to handle part of the workload, such as updating some router configurations and upgrading a certain number of routers, depending on how much the management tool can handle at once.
But the ideal network management architecture, Davis says, would be integrated so that technicians could select devices that needed upgrades via OpenView's database, for instance, and software installations could be scheduled to occur automatically at specific times and for specific devices. "I would like these point tools to be integrated into OpenView so they can perform mass configurations and software downloads," he says.
Integrating and automating these tasks is especially important for JCPenney's expanding network. The retailer now has 3Com Fast Ethernet LANs in all its stores, as well as Gigabit Ethernet in its data centers. The fat pipes are in place to support the company's growing number of Web-based applications, such as its store planning and sales tools. And InfoVision, an application for JCPenney store managers that provides a store's sales data and other information, is being Web-enabled so it can be pulled from JCPenney's intranet server. "This network is really positioning us to deploy more advanced, Web-based applications in our stores," Davis says.
Not surprisingly, this means JCPenney's current management picture isn't going to get any easier. "We are looking at Layer 3 switching and [expanding] Gigabit Ethernet to our server farms," Davis says. "We have a lot of copper out there that we would like to use for Gigabit Ethernet instead of rewiring with fiber."
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