Sun Microsystems Inc finally unveiled its Solstice second generation network management bundle last month, claiming that it takes the management of network devices a step further than existing products in terms of scalability and making it possible for the network to be controlled from any location. Solstice is an aggressive marketing tactic for Sun, which is struggling to keep up with rival environments like Hewlett-Packard Co’s OpenView. Sun boasts it will eventually manage all Digital Equipment Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co and IBM Corp networks. The Solstice line-up includes somethings old, somethings new, somethings borrowed and somethings that are still due.
AutoClient
The management components are SunNet Manager for administering single network sites (now also available on Solaris x86), Co-operative Consoles for managing up to five SunNet Manager networks – both existing Simple Network Management Protocol environments – and the new Common Management Information Protocol-based Enterprise Manager for anything beyond, which its built on the NetLabs Inc Dimons 3G system it licensed in 1993. Key functionality in Solstice is a compatibility library that enables SunNet Manager applications to run under Enterprise Manager. Also new is AutoClient, a system for administering Solaris desktops, which bridges diskless and data-less configurations, the firm says. Sun is targeting telecommunications and financial users for Enterprise Manager, and the company has scooped up Motorola Inc’s Cellular Infrastructure Group, which will use Solstice to develop its new network management system for the wireless industry. The long-promised Enterprise Manager (formerly Sun’s project Encompass) for managing large numbers of devices on multiple networks is a multi-user distributed fault, event and performance management system. It uses Guidelines for the Definition of Managed Objects methods to describe managed resource objects, and is based on the Common Management Information Protocol communications protocols. It is constructed on NetLabs Inc’s Dimons 3G 1.0 Common Management Information Protocol-based kernel (Distributed Management of Networks & Systems) and NerveCenter event correlation system. It supports the SunNet Manager Remote Procedure Call interface, which in turn supports Simple Network Management Protocol 2 and DEC Nice protocols through proxy agents, Sun says. Work on Enterprise Manager began back in December 1993. Around 30% of the original NetLabs code resides in the Enterprise Manager core. The suite includes an application launcher with management tools, a topology map, a repository of static and dynamic management data, a request manager for filtering events and an event logging system. Sun claims Enterprise Manager scales far higher than other network management solutions such as Hewlett-Packard OpenView or IBM NetView for AIX, and can additionally address devices globally – issuing instructions against all routers in a global network at once, for example. Hewlett-Packard and IBM reject the notion, of which more later.
By William Fellows
Enterprise Manager’s management information server defines resources in Guidelines for the Definition of Managed Objects, GDMO, – the server model, which contains a tree-structured naming scheme for all of the managed resources conforms to the Network Management Forum’s OmniPoint 1.0 specification. Sun says it will gradually migrate to Object Management Group Common Object Request Broker Architecture specifications by encapsulating the server’s Portable Management Interface – which is supported in Enterprise Manager and NetLabs’ Dimons 3G – using Interface Definition Language, but does not say when this will happen, or how applications will be able to migrate. Over time, Sun says, it intends to break out some of the discrete services currently integrated in the NetLabs code with its own application programming interfaces. Enterprise Manager supports SunNet Manager 2.2 dynamically linked libraries and will run via Enterprise Manager’s compatibility librar
y SunNet Manager applications, Sun states categorically. Not only can SunNet Manager be modelled under Enterprise Manager, but because SunNet Manager and Enterprise Manager programming interfaces are not protocol-specific, the underlying protocol used can be Simple Network Management Protocol, DECnet or any other, Sun says. An OEM release of Solstice EM 1.0 shipped on the Winter Solstice – last December 21 – production versions follow. Prices go from $19,500 as a single-user, single server configuration. There are run-time and developer implementations which run on Solaris 2.3 or later under Motif. For the telecommunications market, a TMN Q3 interface to Enterprise Manager includes Common Management Information Protocol MPA, SunLink Common Management Information Protocol and SunLink Open Systems Interconnection, all of which are required to communicate with Common Management Information Protocol agents. It is currently a Solaris-only environment, but Sun plans a Precision Architecture RISC HP-UX implementation this year and support for Windows and Windows NT clients via Win32s in 1996. Sun is talking to Novell Inc about a NetWare 4.X access – chief Scott McNealy quipped that Sun could do MIPS – but Nintendo does not need a lot of this stuff. Solstice Co-operative Consoles is a Simple Network Management Protocol-based SunNet Manager add-on that enables changes in a network managed by one SunNet Manager console to be sent to other SunNet Manager consoles.
Repository
It is technology that will not appear in the rival HP OpenView until Hewlett-Packard delivers its Tornado system. Sun has had the technology around for about a year now. Administrators in different parts of an organisation can therefore manage other parts of the network, and not only their own. Sun sees Co-operative Consoles, which includes a distributed data model and repository, as a bridge between SunNet Manager and Enterprise Manager, enabling multiple SunNet Manager consoles to be connected to manage not just single but medium to large enterprise networks. It requires SunNet Manager 2.2.1 or later in Solaris 1.X or SunNet Manager 2.2.2 or later for Solaris 2.X. Future versions will connect with Hewlett-Packard and IBM management applications. The software has been out with independent software vendors since last November, and prices for production versions go from $3,200, and are available now.
