The OSF’s Distributed Management Environment takes 14 submissions on board
The Open Software Foundation yesterday wheeled out DME, its Distributed Management Environment, conceived as the backbone of a vendor-neutral framework for managing distributed computer systems, networks and applications, with a strong object-oriented bent. Of the original 27 accepted submissions to the DME request – subsequently culled to 14 – the Foundation, treading a politically and legally sensitive path, has pragmatically opted to take a mixed bag of technologies from both founder members and independent software houses. As predicted last month, (CI No 1,748), it has plumped for Austin, Texas-based Tivoli Systems Inc’s Wizdom object-oriented distributed management framework to provide the meat of DME. Wizdom includes a set of services that govern object interaction, a management model, graphical display services and a command line interface: it’s said to meet up to three-quarters of the overall technology requirements. The importance of this decision – which should elicit some welcome sighs of relief from a Unix development community currently beleaguered by a swarm of competing technology and standards consortia – is that Foundation rival Unix International Inc on Monday included Tivoli’s technology in its own Atlas framework for developing and managing distributed applications under Unix, (CI No 1,760). And, moreover, the Object Management Group, which is currently struggling to piece together an object-oriented vision of the future, is also expected to bring its Object Request Broker mechanism into line with the Foundation’s Distributed Management Environment, (CI No 1,760). Indeed the Foundation says it is working closely with the Group on compatibility. Compatibility with X/Open’s XOM object management standard is also promised for DME, and the net result of all these forces should mean that some form of object compatibility will likely be assured across all these architectures. For other DME technology, the Foundation has turned to the IBM Corp-Hewlett-Packard Co-Groupe Bull SA-Wang Laboratories Inc submission in preference to the Digital Equipment Corp-Microsoft Corp combination. It is taking Bull’s implementation of the consolidated management application programming interface – CM-API – which will provide a consistent means to access management protocols. From Hewlett, it is taking the Open View network management server, a communications architecture supporting CMIP and SNMP network protocols – for those read Open Systems Interconnection and TCP/IP; a graphical environment which displays network maps; a tool for software installation and distribution and the Network Licence Server, NetLS, a distributed software licensing service. IBM is supplying its Data Engine, a multi-threaded server environment for managing objects and helping them communicate across a network, which includes SNMP comaptibility. Data Engine comes out of IBM’s Yorktown Heights labs. Other technology included is Banyan Systems Inc’s Network Logger – developed by Wang for Banyan Vines – which provides event services such as filtering, forwarding and logging information across a network: it comes with support for MS-DOS. Hudson, Massachusetts-based Gradient Technologies Inc is supplying its NetLS PC Ally and a client library, which extends personal computer support to Hewlett’s NetLS; PC Agent, which enables system administrators to access personal computers from a management station and perform remote functions and file transfer; and PC Event, which forwards error messages from personal computers to a management system. The Foundation has gone to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Project Athena – on which IBM, DEC and Hewlett have worked – for version 2 of the Palladium distributed printing technology. The Foundation offered no timescales on when DME would become available, but most sources suggest that it will take at least 12 months to bring any kind of product to market. It will now go away and take the individual various technologies apart, then p
ut them back, together. Reading between the lines, the last couple of days has seen the warring Unix industry camps more or less admit, publically, to the limits of their respective spheres of influence. Foundation staffers at yesterday’s Paris roll-out said they were now less worried about the fortunes of the OSF/1 operating system, and were more concerned about Motif and the Distributed Computing and Distributed Management technologies that it was bringing to the Unix community. On the other hand, Unix International, which has more or less wrapped up the Unix operating system ground with System V.4, has been prepared to accept the reality of its position, with the recognition of Motif and the acceptance of DCE technology in its plans. Indeed the Foundation said it was very important that Unix International had taken the same path with Atlas as it has done with the Distributed Management Environment.
Members give implementation details for Distributed Computing Environment
At the same time, the Foundation also announced the general availability from year end of its Distributed Computing Environment, DCE, for developing and running applications across heterogeneous computer environments Previously it has been available only in snapshot form to Foundation members – 1,000 of these kits have gone out. Initial reference implementations of DCE are on IBM’s RS/6000 box running AIX and DEC’s MIPS Computer Systems Inc RISC-based DECstation 3100 under Ultrix. A Unix System V.4 version for Intel Corp machines will be out in six months, the Foundation said. DEC has promised full availability of DCE on its systems by next summer, with an early release set for the beginning of the year. In addition, it says it’ll have versions for the Apple Computer Inc Macintosh and Sun Microsystems Inc Sparc workstations by the end of 1992. Bull and Hewlett will implement DCE for their proprietary operating system environments – GCOS and MPE – as well as for their Unix. Likewise IBM says it will release core components of DCE for the MVS/ESA and OS/400 operating systems, as well as for AIX. Gradient Technologies meanwhile, said it would release a version of DCE for personal computers running Microsoft Windows. Hitachi, Siemens-Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG, Stratus Computer Inc and Transarc Corp also announced plans to incorporate DCE into their products, while Informix Corp, Microsoft, and Oracle Corp said they would support the environment. Users already signed-up include Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp, the European Economic Community, Unilever, Sanwa Bank, ARCO and Stanford University. Three copies of a full set of DCE source code, including object redistribution rights subject to object licence fees – costs $150,000: without redistribution rights the price is $15,000. Universities get a campus site source licence for $5,000. DCE can also be licensed as separate components.
