Hewlett-Packard Co plans this week to release a working draft of its Hewlett-Packard OpenView Meta Schema, the first piece of its planned common repository. The draft describes how developers should organise information in their applications so that it can be integrated into the repository. Users should be able to access a common repository with standard database tools and custom applications, Hewlett-Packard says. The Meta Schema was developed in conjunction with its OpenView OEM customers and partners in an OpenView integration working group. It specifies structures for object attributes, topology and trend data collected from distributed management environments. Applications will own specific tables in the repository and these will be accessible for reading from other applications and tools. Hewlett-Packard plans a model for enabling multiple-writer access to databases via services so that the repository can be shared by applications that will in turn be able to generate and use data about a managed environment. The long-term goal of the repository is to enable all OpenView-based applications to integrate and share network and systems management information so that a user can see the status of NetWare, Systems Network Architecture and DECnet environments from a single map rather than on three separate submaps. The Meta Schema is available from the integration workgroup members, the Management Integration Consortium, World Wide Web or from Hewlett-Packard direct.
