Austin, Texas-based Tivoli Systems Inc will this week launch the first commercial applications written for the object-oriented distributed systems administration framework recently endorsed by both Unix International Inc in its Unix Atlas and the Open Software Foundation in Distributed Management Environment. That framework was supplied to both organisations by Tivoli and is now being touted as an industry standard. Tivoli’s WizDom applications include Primary Resource Management for managing users, hosts, groups and network information services; and Privilege and Security Management for managing access and security under Kerberos. The software will be initially available on Sun-3s and 4s running SunOS 4.1 or above, Open Look and Network File System with 8Mb RAM and 60Mb free disk space. Primary Resource Management enables resources to be grouped logically to represent real-world organisational or functional groups. It includes pre-defined profiles for privilege management and basic notification services – and they are customisable. Tivoli expects Privilege and Security Management to speed the adoption of Kerberos, an arcane standard that is hard to install and use by simplifying its application. Including the WizDom Framework and its Macintosh-style graphical user interface, Primary Resource Manager pricing starts at $4,500 for a 10-terminal network and goes up to $125,000 for 500 nodes. Privilege and Security Management with Kerberos starts at $2,250 and goes to $62,500. Evaluation copies are going for $500 and $250 respectively. Site licences can be had for larger networks, and the Primary Resource Management, out next month, is a prerequisite for the Privilege system, which follows in February. WizDom enables end-user and junior systems administration staff to share management responsibilities with the superuser – a first for Unix which has traditionally been an all-or-nothing proposition with the superuser handling everything from strategic policy development to restarting local printers. Tivoli believes that WizDom will eventually improve the required ratio of administrators to nodes from the current 1:30 to 1:100.
