Digital Equipment Corp this week will bring out DEC FullSail, the first comprehensive application put on the market for managing distributed Unix systems, Unigram reports. It is intended to become an actual Open Software Foundation Distributed Management Environment (DME) product, probably one of the first, as that technology becomes available, according to Unix systems management director Roy Shiderly. At initial delivery in September, FullSail will run on Ultrix 4.2 or later systems, moving to DEC OSF/1 and then Sun Microsystems Inc systems six months later. Others will follow. Motif-based, the three module program is designed to simplify day-to-day systems management of user accounts, file systems and systems performance. The software, developed over the last two years at DEC West in Washington state, should free systems managers to be proactive in identifying and preventing potential systems problems while reducing the cost of systems management. An administrator should be able to oversee 50 to 100 systems, accessing FullSail from any workstation or X terminal on the network. The application maintains a database of management and configuration information that is used for batch process management requests, preventing configuration errors and adding new systems. A fully customisable front end groups the systems in a network into management sets according to criteria and policies, however arbitrary, determined by the administrator. It will produce the hard data needed to an alyse resource utilisation and will trigger an alarm mechanism enabling managers to control access. FullSail incorporates a client-server architecture and uses standard protocols including TCP/IP and Remote Procedure Call mechanisms including Apol lo’s and Sun’s. Pricing is $300 per client licence and $6,000 per server for the data base licence; $2,000 per server for the ap plication modules licence. Computer Associates International Inc is believed to be working along the same lines for the system it’s doing for Hewlett-Packard Co machines.
