Cabletron Systems Inc, Rochester, New Hampshire, has added network management capabilities to its Spectrum enterprise manager with release 4.0. The company developed version 4.0 as a result of what it saw to be a large demand from customers to mix Windows NT with Unix, said Patty Ms Chrystycz, director of network and systems management marketing. The new release enables users to mix and match Unix and NT clients and servers. It contains an enterprise-wide alarm management tool that Ms Chrystycz said can monitor an entire environment and in so doing lower the cost of bandwidth. Additionally, it has a policy-based alarm notification manager that will set up custom alarms to any destination in the network. Spectrum 4.0 also includes a new computer-aided software engineering-based reasoning tool that Ms Chrystycz claims makes it superior to HP OpenView, IBM Corp’s NetView for AIX and SunNet Manager, as it provides access to network history and can recommend courses of action. Other network managers can identify faults but cannot resolve them automatically or reduce the number of faults that an operator must deal with, he said. Version 4.0 also adds support for exporting statistics, events and model information from Oracle to Ingres, Sybase and SAS System, fault tolerance to enable continuous enterprise management, an FDDI RingView to view FDDI devices from any vendor in the ring configuration, and World Wide Web-based reporting. The 4.0 enhancements are all Cabletron’s own work. The company does not employ NetLabs Inc object-oriented technology in its core systems but uses its own object techniques. Spectrum 4.0 has 65 applications available for NT and hundreds for Unix, more than any other management systems, Ms Chrystycz said. As part of the upgrade to 4.0, Cabletron is writing migration policy for customers that use the previous incarnation of Spectrum, version 3.1. Clients can run against Spectrum 4.0 servers but 3.1 applications cannot run on 4.0, and 4.0 applications cannot run against a 3.1 server. Cabletron is seeking independent software vendors for network and systems management, focussing on device management, advanced applications for network management and systems management. Cabletron is also developing Spectrum 4.0’s management gateway server for NetWare, which will enable up to 250 servers to be managed from a single console without additional server software. It is also expanding SecureFast Virtual Networking product line for Spectrum 4.0, which it said will enable administrators to establish and execute policies on a per-workgroup or per-user basis in a switched environment. Spectrum 4.0 for HP-UX, AIX, Irix, SunOS and Solaris and Windows NT will be available in the first quarter of 1996 at $15,000 for one server.
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