Tivoli Systems Inc, Austin, Texas, next week will wheel out a new developers toolkit, the first commercially available programmers’ kit for building system management applications compatible with the Open Software Foundation’s Distributed Management Environment, it says. The Environment uses Tivoli’s framework, its object-oriented Management Environment, as its central technology. Tivoli is also introducing a new set of management applications that plug into the framework and promises major productivity gains in managing distributed systems. The applications and toolkit will be available initially on Sun Microsystems Inc Sparcstations running Solaris 1.0. The programs include Tivoli/Courier for automatically distributing software updates throughout a network from any point, and Tivoli/Sentry for remotely monitoring portions of a network or the entire system. Both programs are based around a simple graphical interface. Tivoli calls its new programmers’ toolkit the Advanced Development Environment. It enables developers to construct user interfaces, model system resources, create new objects and build communication hooks into other applications.
Complex systems management scripts
The need for writing complex systems management scripts is supposedly eliminated. Applications created with the toolkit are fully architecture- and network-independent, are fully interoperable across networks and will integrate with the DME standard when it becomes available next year. Tivoli has also built a toolkit for non-programmers, called the Application Extension Facility so they can customise Tivoli applications and migrate existing systems management programmes to a standard. The company has also updated Tivoli/Works, its core applications for primary resource and security management, introduced earlier this year, to Release 1.5. It now supports Motif, and its management of NIS netgroup maps and its interface have been enhanced to include more user feedback, detailed error messages, expanded notification and auditing services and faster installation. The company is offering Works, Sentry, Courier and Application Extension Facility together with a year’s support and two days of on-site training and consulting as the Tivoli Start-Up Package priced at $30,000. Another package including Works, Courier and Sentry starts at $375 a node for a 500-node licence. Application Extension Facility is priced at $3,000 per site and Advanced Development Environment starts at $26,500 for a three-user developers’ installation. Advanced Development Environment includes documentation, a build environment with files for compiling and linking Advanced Development Environment applications, debugging tools, run-time libraries, training and hotline support. Availability for all the products is October 1.
