X/Open Co Ltd’s Systems Management Working Group has agreed to adopt parts of Tivoli Systems Inc’s distributed systems management submission, and will use them as an initial working draft for management services that it is to develop. This will operate within an Object Management Group Corba environment. Services adopted from the submission – the subject of much discussion over recent weeks – include policy management, policy-driven base management, scheduling management, instance management and collection management. These cover a Corba 1.1-compliant object request broker, a set of Object Group Object Services-compliant object services, a set of management services and a systems management application development environment. The group says additional services, including customisation and management events, will be added during the development process – the parts of the Tivoli submission the group voted to leave out. Tivoli expects X/Open to pick-up an alternative Hewlett-Packard Co proposal for customisation management over the next few months, preferred, it believes, because its architecture allows for easier integration into a variety of object request broker implementations. Tivoli has also been named as the editor of the specifications document which describes the draft standard – it will be modified and extended over the coming months to define additional services and to incorporate feedback from the X/Open SysMan group. Tivoli says it will modify its products, which use the Open Software Foundation’s DCE – already endorsed by X/Open – to incorporate any change. The Tivoli submission uses the Object Group standards where they exist, but has extended some that aren’t regarded as complete enough for use in systems management, and added others that aren’t yet fully defined. The draft spec is based upon the Tivoli Management Framework – now claimed to be fully Corba-compliant – and was to have provided the framework for the Open Software Foundation’s full-blown Distributed Management Environment. The draft specs for management services, with additions and modifications, will go forward to become an X/Open preliminary spec in around 12 months. This should encourage validation of the spec via vendor implementations and prototyping – long hand for hoping that trial-use will lead to general adoption. The preliminary spec, because of its nature, may change before being published as a fully-fledged X/Open Common Application Environment specification. The process of moving from a fully-defined preliminary spec to a CAE specification usually takes around 12 months, putting a ratified systems management specification at best around the beginning of 1996 – if there are no hiccups en route.
