Continuing its discussion of its new Solstice network management suite (CI No 2,614), Sun Microsystems Inc says it will extend Co-operative Consoles to provide SunNet Manager-to-Enterprise Manager links this year, with connections to other environments to follow. Solstice also includes a new administration tool for managing Solaris 2.4 desktops called AutoClient 1.0, this time all Sun’s own work. AutoClient extends the ONC+ Caching File System, CacheFS, so that portions of applications, data and the operating system most frequently accessed by the user are stored – cached – locally on a small hard disk on the desktop. This includes Network File System, CD-ROM and floppy-disk reads. All client changes are sent automatically to the server, where client data is also stored, portions of which are automatically downloaded to the desktop, but only on demand.

Local clone

Sun says the schema reduces processor load, network traffic and local disk requirement and makes desktop back-ups unnecessary. Desktops can be added – or reconfigured in the event of failure – from the central copies on the server. Ideally less than 100Mb disk would be required on the desktop, no critical data would be held there and any operating system, swap or users data on the local disk is a local clone of the master server copy. Sun is pitching AutoClient as the answer to the ‘diskless or dataless’ conundrum, providing, it says, the performance benefits of dataless operation, where the most heavily accessed files are stored locally, and diskless, where the desktop holds no data and everything is stored on the server. AutoClient, which can accommodate 50 clients per server costs from $2,500 in sixty days for a single server with a 10-client licence. Support for non-Sun environments is planned, but there are no timescales. The existing SunNet Manager 2.2.2 is now up on Intel Corp iAPX-86 systems running Solaris 2.4 – a PowerPC implementation will follow when SunSoft delivers Solaris-for-PowerPC, now not slated until the second half. At the same time there will be a further SunNet Manager release – either 2.3, 3.0 or some other designation – which, according to Denis Yaro, general manager of SunSoft’s enterprise management products, will come in separate client and server implementations like Enterprise Manager. SunNet Manager 2.2.2 costs from $5,000. Other stuff scheduled for Solstice includes new High Availability Suite, Help Desk, Asset Management and Job Scheduler components for SunSoft’s DiskSuite Solaris subsystem management add-on. They will include features such as drag and drop from network maps and support for RAID 5. Yaro says he will beat Hewlett-Packard Co and its MC/ServiceGuard high-availability solution to market. MC/ServiceGuard is due on the general release of HP-UX 10.0 by mid-year. The rest of the Solstice bag includes AdminTool and JumpStart which are bundled with Solaris 2.X, the SolarNet PC-Admin package which costs from $2,250, DiskSuite (bundled with Enterprise server), the third party Legato Backup utilities (bundled with Enterprise Manager) and the Checkpoint Software Technologies Inc IP FireWall-1 for up to 50 nodes from $5,000. Inviting what will undoubtedly be a hail of response, SunSoft puts Solstice up against Hewlett-Packard, IBM Corp and Microsoft Corp network management environments, saying none of them have the capability of AutoClient, Co-operative Consoles, Enterprise Manager, compatibility across small to large management systems or object-oriented technology. Hewlett-Packard’s OpenView programme manager Gordon MacKinney dutifully took the plunge – denying most of Sun’s claims that OpenView lacks pretty much everything that is in the Solstice Co-operative Consoles and Enterprise Manager.

By William Fellows

Solstice, he argues is simply a bundle of network management technologies – 16 in all – similar in functionality to OpenView, which has 29 products. Hewlett-Packard already offers both Guidelines for the Definition of Managed Objects-based Common Management Information Protocol

and Simple Network Management Protocol versions of its Distributed Management Platform network manager. Indeed it bundles the SNMP system with the Common Management Information Protocol system. The difference, MacKinney says, is that Hewlett-Packard has only licensed NetLabs Inc’s NerveCenter event correlation engine, and not the Common Management Information Protocol architecture, and that NetLabs itself is moving – and advising its customers to move – to the OpenView implementation of its technology, not Enterprise Manager. He admits OpenView lacks Co-operative Consoles-style functionality and the Checkpoint IP Firewall-1. The posturing is all about systems, he says, and given that Enterprise Management is a Sun-only environment right now, it is still way behind OpenView, which is arriving shortly on Solaris and AIX, in addition to its Windows and HP-UX implementations. Tornado is Hewlett-Packard’s plan to take the OpenView Network Node Manager on a single system and move it to so-called satellites that could run at any site or region of a network. The satellites will be made available in a hierarchy-type structure to applications which sit on the OpenView framework but beyond specific platform constraints, such as the Operations, Performance and Admin Centers modules. Tornado retains the underlying Simple Network Management Protocol-based communications structure but all end-user management administration, software installation and other management tasks go through the applications. Customers will not see the framework itself. It is a radically different approach to Sun’s point-to-point solutions, MacKinney argues. Tornado phase one, which will include some user interface and integration enhancements is due this summer. Hewlett-Packard’s Co-operative Consoles-style ‘manager of managers’ and fully distributed architecture is not now expected until the first half of next year. In the meantime, the AIX, Solaris and NetWare implementations of OpenView are due in July, with the Operations, Performance and Admin Centers modules set to appear in May. Hewlett-Packard’s planned future Object Group Common Object Request Broker Architecture-compliant Synergy network management environment will run Simple Network Management Protocol or Guidelines for the Definition of Managed Objects applications, it says, providing a migration route for OpenView users. MacKinney furthermore tilts at IBM’s NetView for AIX, arguing that IBM, which currently pays royalties to Hewlett-Packard for its OpenView-based network manager, is in his view set to go its own way with Karat, the planned object-based network management system, and will therefore have to break compatibility with NetView for AIX.

Karat

IBM denies Sun’s sweeping claims that its NetView and other AIX technologies lack the functionality of AutoClient, Co-operative Consoles and Enterprise Manager – and Hewlett-Packard’s charges too. It says it can do all Solstice offers and more, claiming the Mountain View company’s lack of support for non-Sun systems and mainframes means it is simply a small-to-medium scale proprietary environment. IBM says if there is anything it has missed then it will feature in Karat, its forthcoming integrated network management release. Karat in its initial guise is all about making network management easier to understand and use, rather than changing the technology, according to IBM’s director of Enterprise Management, Lynn Wilczak. Hewlett-Packard, she says, is only playing catch-up to NetView for AIX with its Tornado release, and will not approach Karat’s functionality. Ms Wilczak says Hewlett-Packard’s claim that IBM will have to break compatibility between NetView for AIX and Karat is absolutely false, adding that only 10% of NetView for AIX code is now based on HP OpenView in any case. All procedural NetView for AIX application programming interfaces will be supported under Karat, she promises, saying that it will move to an object-oriented paradigm over time.