Sun Gets Serious About Systems Management

Sun Microsystems Inc. will unveil a software product today that gets the Unix vendor into the enterprise systems management arena. Sun Management Center 2.1, formerly Sun Enterprise SyMON, is a comprehensive software development kit that brings multiple capabilities under one framework to manage the complexity and performance issues of the Solaris OS. Sun will also provide integration between Management Center and the enterprise systems management frameworks from CA, HP, and Tivoli.

Management Center's simple, Java-based graphical user interface will satisfy customer requests for simplicity, but the long-term goal of the management environment is to take manual administration out of the mix completely. Features include predictive failure analysis, active/dynamic configuration management, and user-defined alarm parameters. Management Center 2.1 will cost nothing for single node support, $2,500 for two nodes, $10,000 for 10 nodes, and $50,000 for 100 nodes.

An early customer of Management Center looks forward to better security and uptime for jobs happening overnight. "We have a lot of activity overnight, and the operator doesn't have the Solaris skills to solve a lot of the problems," says Hussein Baniamer, associate director of technology for investment house Tokyo-Mitsubishi International PLC in London. Baniamer looks forward to APIs to create integration between his apps and Management Center. He says, "the system will look at many more things and graphically tell our operator to contact the right expert."