The Interactive Network Design Manual

The Systems Management Dimension

Introduction

As long as there have been computers, people have been maintaining them-trying to keep them up and running and practicing careful discipline to avoid breaking one part while upgrading another. A difficult group of tasks have been learned as much from the school of hard knocks as through technical documentation.

Buzzing around with the sound of breakthrough technology, terms such as "distributed systems management," "enterprise systems management" and plain old "network systems management" now are used religiously by their marketing inventors to specify new and wonderful ways to apply control to networked systems. It's no surprise that the differences between products do not necessarily follow these sizzling handles, but are defined in the depth, breadth and integration of each product. This definition borrows heavily from the mainframe past, but is considerably more complex with the addition of distributed multiple operating system, and intelligent client/server systems.

In the centralized world of mainframes this discipline and the tools to perform it have been carefully honed over years of supporting critical business applications. With the movement of critical processes out onto the distributed world of PCs, workstations and servers, the centralized systems management disciplines are being retooled to control this decentralized, traditionally unmanaged computing resource.

As if this distributed heterogeneity wasn't complex enough, each vendor's product and/or products encompass a differing set of disciplines, for a different set of operating systems, using different architectures, that may or may not be standards-based. Add to this the fun of the waiting game as promised new releases, products and architectures are raced to market over the next 12 to 18 months. Building a systems management strategy is an individual, complex balance between what you have, what your needs are, how much you are willing to pay-and your pain threshold.

Many products herald the systems management banner. Some are so complex they are complete categories unto themselves, such as database, helpdesk, network or storage. Others are so specific as to apply only to point solutions. In the case of the former, we will leave the feature analysis to a separate discussion that will do justice to the complexity of the category. In the case of the latter, we suggest that whatever the specific function needed that the reader look for integration with the larger systems management suites as an important purchase requirement.

Updated December 17, 1996

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