Hewlett-Packard Co has begun delivering on the promise of service management it made in March (CI No 3,360), announcing enhancements to its OpenView enterprise management software. At the annual gathering of OpenView customers in Seattle, HP introduced version 6.0 of OpenView Network Node Manager and OpenView NetMetrix. The new versions are said to be integrated more tightly than ever before and HP says that in tandem they will provide customers with the ability to manage network services proactively and greatly reduce network downtime through automated performance reporting, monitoring and analysis tightly integrated with Node Manager’s standard network-management platform. New features of Node Manager include: out-of-the-box reports for network-trend analysis; a data warehouse which aggregates and trims topology, event and SNMP collected data to allow easy access from standard reporting and data-mining tools; event-correlation technology to enable faster problem resolution by pinpointing the source of network problems; a Java-based user interface for easier access; and automated backup, management station failover and heterogeneous management from Windows NT, HP-UX and Sun Solaris. The new incarnation of NetMatrix offers: performance management of Cisco Catalyst 5000 and 5500-based switch internetwork and VLANs; performance monitoring, analysis and reporting for the entire network – including LAN, WAN, ATM, virtual circuits and LANE – all from one user interface; and expanded report capability, which includes web-based network- component health reports where one reporter provides both global and local network-component health and network-performance reports. The new versions of each product are expected to be available in the fall, with pricing for each product starting at $5,000. HP also announced OpenView IT Service Manager 5.5, which features new work-management and inventory-reconciliation capabilities. The work-management capabilities provide an overview of outstanding work across IT service-management processes, enabling users to address time-management and prioritization issues. The inventory-reconciliation manager feature allows integration with multiple systems management platforms through the uploading of infrastructure data into a central configuration-management database. From there active, infrastructure changes – such as desktop applications and versions of operating systems – can be tracked and matched against pre-defined change-management procedures. IT Service Manager 5.5, which HP says is fully Year 2000 compliant, is expected to ship in late summer, but prices have yet to be announced.
