Agents infiltrate Tivoli

One-touch management will bring welcome changes to the enterprise systems world, reports John Leyden.

Tivoli intends to revolutionise the networked world with its not-soystems world, reports John Leyden. secret agents. The agents, in this case, are not those of a hostile power but software agents within its enterprise management platform. These, Tivoli believes, will slash administration and speed the implementation of new applications and services within corporates.

The latest version of the vendor's enterprise systems management software, Tivoli Enterprise 3.6, introduces a three-tier architecture with 'intelligent' management agents that together make the platform more scalable. The three tiers of Tivoli Enterprise are the server manager, gateways and end points running a Tivoli Management Agent (TMA).

This structure also reduces bandwidth on the Wan as the management console doesn't communicate with each desktop but a gateway server.

The server manager controls the management tasks and their distribution to the gateways. Gateways then allocate these tasks and supervise their execution by the agents. These agents are small (250-350KB) and will be included in both hardware and software delivered by Tivoli partners.

In an upbeat address to customers and industry partners at Planet Tivoli in Disneyland Paris last week, Tivoli chief executive, Jan Lindelow, outlined the benefits of software-based management agents to end users.

"Never again will you have to deploy a small army of technicians," said Lindelow. "We can now deliver on the promise of one-touch management."

On a podium he shared with a Mickey Mouse in Sorcerer's Apprentice costume, Lindelow spelled out his vision of the platform expanding to devices like mobile phones and PDAs.

"Our goal is to make our management agents like a virus. We want them to be pervasive. We want them to be everywhere," said Tom Bishop, Tivoli's chief technology officer.

The Halifax bank has been part of the beta testing program for Tivoli Enterprise and has deployed it over 30,000 workstations and 2,500 servers.

Last month the bank rolled out version 3.6 of TMA into its business centres and branches, a task that only took one day.

"Did we have problems with the rollout? The answer is yeah. It's very big, it's complex, it's software!" said Allan Bentley, the project manager of enterprise-wide systems management at Halifax.

Bentley said the ability to swiftly deploy new applications was crucial to the bank, never more so than now when phone banking means retail banks have to become 24 hours a day, seven days a week businesses.

"Speed is crucial. For each day's delay you impact the service. Delivery has to be fast and consistent. Minimising cost of ownership is not really the thing," he said.

The software distribution involved the transmission of online manuals, carrying out 40 changes in the Halifax's applications and implementing four platform changes. In the bank's five corporate centres, it involved the rollout of Lotus Notes to 6,000 desktops.

Bentley explained that using Tivoli Enterprise, the Halifax was able to perform the "unintrusive" rollout while carrying out its normal business functions, such as backups.

Work is currently under way to completely rewrite the Tivoli framework in Java. The release of the Java-based framework is expected late next year.

"SNMP will be replaced by something based on Java. This will enable much tighter integration," said Bishop. He added that SNMP does not address a number of problems, such as user management and application monitoring.

Bishop said Microsoft will bundle the TMA with NT5. Microsoft also agreed to bundle Computer Associates' TNG platform with NT5, but Bishop is dismissive of its functionality.

"CA are out to hook you and convince you that they're doing something that they aren't," said Bishop. "CA is delivering a common information model browser. It has nothing to do with agent technology. The problem is configuring all the agents with all the clients."

Bishop said that Microsoft was effectively putting Tivoli client technology and CA desktop technology within NT5.

Paul Mason, vice-president for infrastructure software research with IDC, said Tivoli's and CA's products are moving closer together.

"The availability of management agents gives a significant advantage to Tivoli. Software distribution can be like painting the Forth Bridge: once you've finished one rollout it's time for another upgrade," said Mason.

ALL CHANGE: FROM AGENTS TO JAVA

New with Tivoli Enterprise 3.6

Implementation of a three-tier architecture, and introduction of software agents.

Announced last week

Tivoli NetView for OS/390 will integrate with CiscoWorks 2000 and CiscoWorks Blue Maps so that administrators can manage Cisco networking devices from the mainframe. This is done with HP's OpenView for Unix and Solaris, so that Tivoli users can see OpenView management data. Integration with IBM Nways Manager will allow management of distributed and host-based IBM hardware. Together all of these elements will help administrators pull together their companies' heterogeneous operating and management platforms and deal with both IP and SNA.

Coming in version 4.0, due at the end of 1999

Better support for mobile platforms including the ability to queue requests during the time a mobile user is not connected to the network.

Moving to Java, which Tivoli says will make software three or four times smaller.