IBM’s AS/400 development team is working to beef up its rather limited network management. At the moment the machine is restricted in the main to managing itself, but Jim Morcomb, AS/400 system management consultant at IBM’s Rochester, Minnesota labs wants to position the AS/400 as the leader in system management. Particular emphasis is being placed on managing non-SNA systems, so Morcomb says that Simple Network Management Protocol support will be added in the near future. At the same time TCP/IP support for the machine is being completely written – it was rather quick and dirty the first time around. Not only will the AS/400 be able to handle SNMP-based network devices, but the machine itself will be manageable from SNMP network management stations, including the RS/6000. Morcomb also promises a object-based user interface that will handle network devices irrespective of whether they are SNA or SNMP. The other big push will be in Novell NetWare management – there’s not a lot of support for IPX at the moment, Morcomb admits, but this will change. But since when has network management been a major goal for the AS/400? Since Day One says Morcomb, who admits that the division has been slow off the mark in developing the network-specific agents. Though management support has been weak until now, IBM says the machine’s architecture, and particular the integrated database, makes it ideal for the task. Competitors like Hewlett-Packard, he says, are building from the bottom up and only now getting on to the task of how to integrate and automate their network management tools. It is the automation capabilities that Morcomb is particularly enthusiastic about and he promises centralised change management, licence control and the like, automated from the AS/400 in the near future – which means 12 to 18 months. Despite his optimism, IBM is not going to be putting the AS/400 head-to-head against the likes of Sun Microsystems Inc’s SunNet Manager or HP OpenView. Instead, the main market will be existing AS/400 customers that want to control their mixed networks from a single point. – Chris Rose
