Systems management software has been regarded as essential for a
long time in the mainframe world. More recently, as IT sites have
moved towards running multiple different platforms, the major
players have expanded to cover Unix and Windows NT as well. But the
fourth major server platform, the AS/400, has been very much
neglected.
None of the major system vendors, such as Computer Associates,
Hewlett-Packard, and Tivoli, had shown much interest in the AS/400
in the past. But at Tivoli that started to change when the company
was acquired by IBM in early 1996.
Up to that point IBM was planning to serve its AS/400 customers
with the SystemView product set, launched for the platform six
months earlier (and still available and supported today). But with
the acquisition of Tivoli it made more sense to deploy that
company's existing system management expertise for AS/400 users,
and that has been the thrust of development since then.
Up to 1996 Tivoli had been concentrating on Unix, and to a
lesser extent Windows NT, as its major areas of expansion. The
company was particularly strong in the Sun and HP Unix, Windows NT
and Novell environments. But in 1997 Tivoli started supporting the
AS/400 on its flagship product set, Tivoli Enterprise, by
introducing a TEC (Tivoli Enterprise Console) Adapter for the
product. This allows monitoring of alerts via a centralised
console.
That small beginning was followed a year later by the
introduction of full support for the AS/400 as part of Tivoli
Enterprise Version 3.6. This brought the AS/400 within the
architectural framework of the Enterprise product set as a single
managed object, or endpoint. It was done via a piece of software
called a Tivoli Management Agent, or TMA. The TMA communicates via
a gateway with a management server, which provides the system
management functionality, maintains the associated database, and
displays messages and information on a central console.
Tivoli initially introduced two of its five main system
management applications for the AS/400: real time monitoring and
inventory management. Monitoring is performed at job, subsystem and
communications levels, and incorporates automated responses to
preprogrammed sets of circumstances. Inventory management covers
hardware, software (AS/400 licensed program products) and PTFs.
These have successively been followed by the other three
applications: software distribution; user administration; and
security. Software distribution covers PTFs, files, and objects, as
well as program products. User administration allows you to control
who is on the system and what aspects of it they have access to.
Security allows control by object, resource and group.
All five of these applications are centrally managed from a
console, using the same techniques as for all other platforms. So
an AS/400 running any version of OS/400 still supported by IBM can
now be managed in an IT environment in exactly the same way as a
mainframe, a Unix, or an NT server, and by the same people who are
already doing this without their needing any additional training.
Other than OS/400, the only software prerequisites are TCP/IP and
an AS/400 source editor, such as Code/400 (used for configuration
and to create tasks).
Tivoli is planning to expand on this, by 'moving the AS/400 up
the Tivoli architecture', as AS/400 marketing segment manager Aaron
Tobin puts it. 'We will be supporting the AS/400 as a Tivoli
gateway,' promises Tobin, 'which means you can attach end points to
an AS/400, and manage them from it.'
With this facility TMA software sits in the object to be
managed, and communicates with the gateway. It can download
programs from the gateway on demand to sort out problems. AS/400s
running OS/400 V4R3, and above, will be able to run the
gateway.
Tivoli is also planning to add application management, providing
similar facilities dedicated to and tailored for specific
applications. Two applications are currently planned, Domino and
MQSeries.
Tivoli Manager for Domino is scheduled to become available on
the AS/400 during this summer - the release date had not been
finalised as we went to press, but it will probably be about the
time this issue is published.
According to Tobin: 'You will be able to manage Domino on an
AS/400 as you can do today on NT.' Tivoli's product will support
Domino 4.6 and 5.0, and will run on OS/400 V4R3 and above, as will
Tivoli Manager for MQSeries, which is a little further down the
track but should still be out this year. It will support MQSeries
for AS/400 V4.2.1, and will provide configuration management,
availability, and performance monitoring, event management, and
software distribution and installation.
All of this Tivoli Enterprise product set is aimed at the large
corporate user running AS/400s as part of a complex IT
infrastructure that typically includes mainframes and Unix and NT
servers, as well. But what about the smaller customer, for whom the
AS/400 is the principal server platform?
Tivoli has a separate product, IT Director, aimed at SMEs.
According to European product manager Greg Slade: 'Small to medium
companies have the same management issues and needs.' So IT
Director contains much the same functionality as Tivoli Enterprise,
but differs in that it is not tied to the Enterprise framework.
This makes it easier to install and use, essential for sites
without a large staff of skilled IT professionals.
IT Director was introduced for users of NT, Windows 95, and OS/2
systems. Tivoli added AS/400 support around a year ago, in the
third quarter of 1999, in Version 2.1 of IT Director. This allows
both support of AS/400s as managed objects and use of the AS/400 as
the management server, using DB2/400 as the data repository.
The three major functions offered by IT Director are real time
monitoring; inventory; and hyperautomation.
Monitoring covers all the key AS/400 resources, and allows the
user to set performance thresholds that trigger alerts. Inventory
covers both hardware and software, and includes IP addresses.
Hyperautomation is Tivoli's word for automating responses to
predefined sets of circumstances.
For the future, says Slade: 'We will start application
monitoring and, specific to V4R4, we will be able to do software
distribution.' Application management, says Slade: 'Is one of the
big requests; users want to manage the applications as well as the
systems. Mainly this is for Domino.'
With the growth of e-commerce, and the arrival of storage area
networks, storage management is becoming an increasingly important
part of system management, both from the user's point of view, and
from the supplier's (Tivoli expects to gain more revenues from
storage management than from its traditional system management
products for the first time this year).
According to Tivoli San strategy manager Ron Riffe: 'One of our
themes is to assist customers in lowering the total cost of
ownership. Our approach is to integrate traditional system
management techniques with storage management techniques, to
provide a common solution.
'Tivoli has created techniques for network management,
consolidating events, creating help desk functions, centralised
reporting, and fixing of problems, and trending analysis - we have
products in all those areas. One of our big initiatives is to take
all our storage management products, and fully integrate them with
Tivoli event console and application management pieces. Everything
we create will be able to be integrated with system
management.'
Tivoli is starting here from a much stronger position in the IBM
market than it did with its system management products. IBM has
offered a version of its ADSM product for the AS/400 since 1994.
Since last year this product has been marketed by Tivoli, and it
has accordingly been rechristened Tivoli Storage Manager. With the
advent of AS/400 support within Tivoli Enterprise, these two
products can now be integrated in the way Riffe describes.
Tivoli Storage Manager provides traditional storage management
facilities, such as backup/restore, archiving, and disk space
management, and also hierarchical storage management, allowing
migration of data from one storage device to another, according to
predefined policies.
More recently, Tivoli has allowed the AS/400 to be used as a
client within an enterprise infrastructure where another platform
is designated as the server. That applies from OS/400 V4R3
onwards.
So Tivoli is offering AS/400 users system management facilities
that have just not been available up till now. The company feels it
has a real advantage in tapping the huge market of AS/400 users. As
Greg Slade says: 'Nobody does what we do: nobody is doing
integrated system management from a centralised console.'