A bunch of ex-Open Software Foundation refugees involved in the stillborn Distributed Management Environment are planning to use Tivoli Systems Inc’s Tivoli Management Environment as the system to manage off-the-shelf Distributed Computing Environment and DCE-based applications. Based in Munich, Germany, Santix Software GmbH, a six-year-old Distributed Computing Environment and Encina reseller and Tivoli training center, is developing a suite of management applications for DCE 1.1 called DCEmgmt. Much of the Computing Environment’s development was concerned with integrating services and little thought was given to managing the services, says Santix president and chief executive Michael Santifaller. The first of the five components, DCEmgmt/Security Manager, is due in July with extended host, user and group and Network Information Systems management capabilities for Tivoli’s Admin application and organization, principal and account management for DCE domains. Santifaller was a member of the Distributed Management Environment Request for Technology evaluation team, and one of the architects in the Management Environment technology integration project.
Cell change management
Santifaller claims that Tivoli has approved the work and plans to sell the suite direct in Europe. He’s in discussion with Tivoli as well as Boston, Massachusetts-based distributor Intellisoft Corp to market its technology in the US. It expects each component to go for between $5,000 and $10,000 per cell but won’t firm up pricing until it has a deal with Tivoli. Meantime it expects its Security Manager to include a single point of management for Distributed Computing Environment and non-DCE user and group resources, a graphical front end to manage the resources and integration with Tivoli/Admin. A second release, due in the first quarter of 1997, will extend these features to include an access control list manager to protect the distributed file system, a keytab file manager, multicell trust management and extended registry attribute management. Next out of the blocks will be an event manager, designed to integrate DCE 1.1 into Tivoli’s Enterprise Console enabling the collection of management events from several sources. Due to arrive in the fourth quarter, it is to include integrated events from standard DCE 1.1 services, integrated Distributed Computing Environment auditing events, and a mechanism for integrating DCE 1.1-based application events. The Cell Configuration manager, which is due in the first quarter of next year, will provide functions through which a DCE 1.1 cell can be created and existing cell configurations can be modified. Features include configurations of the DCE 1.1 security service, the cell directory service, time service, replicated DCE 1.1 servers, clients and cell change management. Distributed File System Manager will enable Distiributed File configuration for the DFS application, creation of aggregates, file sets and mountpoints, back-ups and read-only file sets and integration of auditing and events with Event Manager. It is planned for the second quarter of 1997. Also planned for the second quarter is the final piece of the jigsaw, Application Manager, for integrating the management of DCE 1.1 into the Tivoli Management Environment framework including configure-unconfigure, start-stop, enable-disable and modify applications and services. It is up initially under Solaris, and other Unix and Windows NT systems are planned.
