San Mateo, California-based Software Professionals Inc brought a new set of automated system administration tools to UniForum this week as Enlighten, which it describes as a more lightweight alternative to heavyweights such as CA-Unicenter. Enlighten is the product of core technology developed by Software Professionals, integrated with the Trapper Simple Network Management Protocol manager it acquired when it bought San Jose-based Network Partners Inc last December. Enlighten has a common interface that runs under X Window or Open Look, and administers Sun Microsystems Inc, IBM Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co and Santa Cruz Operation Inc Unix boxes. It’s not as robust as something like Unicenter, lacking stuff like a job scheduler and trouble ticketing, but Software Professionals open systems manager Rob Donatch explains that in its experience of the 400-odd customers using its fault-tolerant Guardian administration applications on Tandem Computers Inc kit, many find large-scale administration environments (like Unicenter) too complicated and time-consuming to operate and are seeking simpler approaches to the task. Enlighten sends trap information to Simple Network Management Protocol network managers such as SunNet Manager, HP OpenView and IBM NetView and provides a common management point for administration tasks, some of which are not supported under these other environments. Software Professionals says it will unbundle pieces of its software for licensing in third party products and for building vertical market packages. The Enlighten core includes Sys Admin and Events modules. Sys Admin has management and monitoring applications under a common graphical user interface, including Watchdog, which monitors thresholds – disk, swap space, printer availability, remote host availability and file sizes. Events automatically collects and saves event information that is monitored by third party network managers, and controls and monitors devices. Future versions will provide for management of Oracle and Sybase databases. The event-driven software does not poll across a network but gathers information about all processor, input-output, file system, operating system, Remote Procedure Call, network resource allocation and usage activity. Sys Admin, with seven applications is from $360 for each managed system of 50 and Events is $175, again for each managed system of 50. Enlighten is up under SunOS, Solaris, AIX 3 and 4.1 (Sys Admin only), HP-UX 9.X and Santa Cruz Unix and is out at eight beta sites. Software Professionals, which went public this time last year, has 400-odd customers running its existing management software on Tandem Guardian-based kit. It is in the process of transferring those applications onto Tandem’s Unix-based Integrity series and re-badged Silicon Graphics Inc servers, and to the Open System Services layer Tandem is adding to the NonStop kernel implementation of Guardian. It is likely to follow Tandem to Windows NT too.
