Network Computingwww.networkcomputing.com

Even though SNMP has improved and remains the standard at the heart of network management, it hasn't been the panacea it once seemed. SNMP finally includes security and bulk transfer, but its implementation remains inconsistent. Various systems offer SNMP MIBs as checklist items, but they haven't made SNMP support a strategic management methodology.

In addition, RMON (Remote Monitoring) and RMON II have gained wide implementation but face serious processing and deployment challenges. When the RMON standard was defined, a single RMON probe could gather shared statistics. Now, however, switched dedicated segments have pushed RMON MIBs into switches' ports, giving the statistics limited scope and value. RMON II still requires more processing than the switches have available. So to get to RMON II's wealth of network and higher-layer protocol information, probes must be deployed, and must be placed strategically to capture a meaningful amount of traffic and justify the additional cost.

Meanwhile, proprietary methods, MIBs and command-line interfaces make it nearly impossible for network- and systems-management vendors to provide useful information, because the interfaces are often so poorly documented.

What's in Store

New initiatives from the DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force) hold promise but have not yet been widely implemented. CIM (Common Information Model) and DEN (Directory Enabled Networking) have moved quickly through the DMTF's vendor-only process, and stand to make a difference for cross-vendor, cross-platform management. Only a couple of reference platforms, such as Tivoli Systems' NetView and Microsoft Corp.'s Systems Management Server (SMS), have included this ability to commonly describe management information, but many more will be released this year. Some of the more exciting possibilities include storing CIM information in Novell's and Microsoft's directories, which would provide a common storage method for configuration of network devices, from desktops to printers to routers and switches.

Meantime, a new class of products is getting data from wherever possible and making sense of it. These network-performance-management and application-monitoring tools came out of the woodwork recently and became consolidated in just a few months. They overlapped and added functions so quickly that the inexpensive, single-function utilities were either gobbled up or imitated and bundled into suites of products that monitor network-application use and lower-level, bit-and-byte capacity on the network. NextPoint Networks' NextPoint S3 took top honors in our network-performance-management category, thanks to its reliability and an ideal mix of data from many diverse systems (see "Network Management That Works").

I'm Too Sexy for My Configuration

Who would have predicted that the configuration of network devices would garner the hot, sexy headlines last year? PBNM (policy-based network management) is not the end-all management solution for the enterprise network--at least not yet. But it does help configure many aspects of the network--QoS (Quality of Service), VPNs (virtual private networks) and user-to-QoS mappings, to name a few--that were previously left on the command line.

The platform-independent vendors have focused largely on QoS and access control on the LAN and WAN. The vendors who make platform-specific software, meanwhile, are trying to swallow the fish whole, tackling everything from user management to VLANs (virtual LANs), to device configuration, voice-over-IP provisioning, VPN creation and QoS/access control. Of our winners and finalists in the PBNM category, two are platform-independent--winner Orchestream, with its Orchestream Enterprise Edition, and finalist IP Highway, with its Open Policy System.

But the vendors' individual solutions also have a lot of promise. Cisco Systems has a wide variety of tools that are finally coming together under one roof. The company's policy efforts at last have some focus and will guide the way things are done in the coming year. Cisco says it plans to integrate its products with both Microsoft Windows 2000's Active Directory and Novell's NDS.

Where will this technology go in the next year? Orchestream and companies like it have strong multivendor platforms that can do wonders for a mixed environment and represent the state of the art. But in the long term, the single-vendor solutions will likely win out.

Reinventing the Winners

The big network-management vendors have shrunk significantly this year because of Computer Associates' acquisition of Platinum Technology and the near death of Cabletron Systems and its network-management platform, Spectrum. But the products that survive--namely, Hewlett-Packard Co.'s OpenView Network Node Manager, IBM Corp./Tivoli Systems' Tivoli Enterprise and Veritas Software Corp.'s NerveCenter--have reinvented themselves to remain viable (see "Network Management Solutions Lack Clear Leader").

In the past year, HP spun off its test division, now Agilent Technologies, which now produces NetMetrix, HP's aging RMON application. NetMetrix is tightly integrated into the granddaddy of network-management platforms, HP OpenView. HP has given the OpenView suite a face-lift. OpenView's operations management and network management now reside in a combined suite, dubbed VantagePoint Operations.

IBM, which bought Tivoli in 1996 and melded NetView into the Tivoli Enterprise management framework, has again taken the lead by spearheading the adoption of the DMTF's CIM. IBM is providing more than just lip service to the standardization effort; it is first to market with CIM capability in NetView.

Veritas, previously a division of Seagate Software, continues to improve on the workhorse of event correlation, NerveCenter. Realizing that it can correlate events for anybody, Veritas has completed integration with the likes of CA Unicenter TNG, Tivoli Enterprise, HP OpenView and Micromuse Netcool/Omnibus.

It hasn't been only these giants that continue to provide value. The remote-control vendors are still in the thick of most network management strategies, thanks primarily to the proliferation of Microsoft NT as an applications platform. NT's lack of remote management tools has kept alive CrossTec Corp., Stac Software and even Symantec Corp., in its ninth major version of pcAnywhere, with tools to manage the networked enterprise. Of course, with Windows 2000's inclusion of terminal services for remote management, the playing field is likely to look very different in 2001.

The Simple Things

Often, we forget about simplicity when it comes to SNMP management. The work involved in getting the huge platforms up and running overshadows the value returned. But there are SNMP products that don't take years to make work--and in fact work pretty much out of the box. Castle Rock Computing's SNMPc 5.0 Workgroup Edition, Ipswitch's WhatsUp Gold and MG-Soft's Net Inspector are far from being new or radically changed this year, but they sure do work (see "Putting Simple Back Into SNMP"). All are very useful for getting at that 80 percent that matters most when managing a network.

WhatsUp Gold, our pick for best midrange SNMP software, won by simply keeping track of servers and network devices. SNMPc, on the other hand, comes with a very complete MIB library and offers a growing organization a migration path by being able to support multiple servers. MG-Soft's Net Inspector has the best MIB browser and compiler we have used.

Handle With Care

In network and systems management, it's just as easy to overlook the mundane tasks of moving files from one location to another. But that isn't something you'd want to do manually. Moving over WAN links requires special care, too, as the bandwidth available is usually precious. To this end, we tested Microsoft's SMS 2.0, HP's OpenView Desktop Administrator 5.0 and Software Pursuits' SureSync (see "File Distribution Across the WAN"). SMS and Desktop Administrator are suites that manage everything about desktops but have within them special abilities to meter the amount of bandwidth file transfers use. SMS offered the most control over bandwidth, with specific queuing controls for LAN, SNA, RAS, X.25 and even courier deliveries. This kind of control goes a long way to preserving bandwidth. SureSync won our Best Value award by offering very flexible and easy-to-use file-synchronization features without costing an arm and a leg.