The continuing, and now seemingly terminal inability of the Open Software Foundation to deliver its DME Distributed Management Environment in a timely fashion, has effectively thrown open the world of Unix systems management again – and the picture at the moment is somewhat confused. To challenge Microsoft Corp’s integrated Windows interface application set, the Common Open Software Environment firms, and others besides, have turned to the CDE Common Desktop Environment, backed by X/Open Co Ltd’s fast-track process, to achieve it. Standard network administration and systems management for Unix – already straddled by Microsoft in Windows NT and the forthcoming Hermes software distribution and management tool set – is once again a hot potato. Hewlett-Packard Co has been blowing hard about its Simple Network Management Protocol-based OpenView distributed systems adminstration and management suite for ages now, and the software is now architected to work across a range of third party systems. To garner broader appeal, observers expect Hewlett-Packard to team OpenView with IBM Corp’s NetView management environment in a bid to win the COSE systems management ticket – if, in the wake of the Open Software Foundation Distributed Management Environment, COSE has now decided to level the playing field at this point. There are other candidates too, however. Tivoli Systems Inc, whose Tivoli Management Environment framework was to have been the basis of DME, is also pitching for the systems management play again. Tivoli Management is already backed by a variety of vendors, including Sun Microsystems Inc and Unix System Laboratories Inc, and in conjunction with the Novell Inc unit Tivoli has submitted a specification for a systems management application programming interface to X/Open Co, which it believes is receiving systems management submissions on COSE’s behalf and will be fast-tracking a systems management specification alongside Common Desktop Environment.
Tivoli
Tivoli first offered its systems management application programming interface to COSE back in March. This version is a second-generation implementation of TME, which is now compliant with the Object Management Group’s Common Object Request Broker Architecture IDL lang-age. Formal deputations and a review of submissions are expected to be heard by X/Open’s systems management working group in November. X/Open, meanwhile, has been trumpeting the efforts of the Santa Cruz Operation Inc with its home-grown object-oriented systems management, which is claimed to be operating system-independent. No-one at X/Open was able to shed any light on its systems management strategy last week.
