P&A Power
James Governor
06 May 02
Why should P&A be any different from other Tivoli groups in the way it drives the IBM division forward? The key reason is the current broad industry movement towards component-based development (CBD) for applications and webServices. Both Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and Microsoft .NET are CBD frameworks, primarily designed for building loosely coupled applications. Managing performance is more critical with this type of deployment and development model. Hard-coded, tightly coupled apps by definition tend to offer better, more stable, and more easily controlled performance than loosely coupled apps. The need for strong performance management capabilities is particularly apparent when the application in question spans network or even organizational boundaries, which is exactly what happens with XML Web Services or remote procedure calls (RPCs). Not only does performance management become dramatically more important, it also becomes fundamentally more difficult. This difficulty is because, in many cases, the resource being accessed is not under direct management. If an organization is calling a network service that happens to be "in the network cloud," whether that cloud is being managed by another division or an outside service provider, then how is that to be managed?
This fundamental disconnection is driving the need for more standardized management methods. As monolithic apps are teased apart, as the network fabric becomes a network quilt, standard methods are required to address the growing complexity. Enterprises, vendors, and systems management vendors are no longer in a position to manage every endpoint, or even every server constituting an application. They can't go installing agents left, right, and center in other organizations' infrastructures.
Therefore systems management is changing. Infrastructure components increasingly publish system events using standard formats that a management console can understand, and the consoles, in turn, can publish changes to back to the components under management; these components, in effect, have management agents pre-installed, embedded as part of the infrastructure. Vendors have long been building manageability into their products; this is nothing new, but what marks the New Management out it that the instrumentation is now standards-based, and applicable to other platforms. The DMTF's CIM database management model, for example, is not only applicable to Oracle, DB2, and Microsoft SQL Server, but is also very likely to be adopted by all three vendors. The CIM-based Database Management Standard working group, announced in February 2002, includes BMC Software, Cisco, Compaq, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Visionael, and Vision Solutions. This kind of standards-based bi-directional management is gaining ever more traction as the industry moves away from monolithic apps and systems.
Systems management then is increasingly a business intelligence and management function, rather than a race to install agents on every endpoint. The framework wars, defined by CA's and Tivoli's agent distribution slugfest, are largely over—not least because the great majority of companies with infrastructures complex enough to warrant framework purchases have already made those purchases.
P&A, then, stands out because it is leading the Tivoli charge towards the world of standard-based instrumentation, with the infrastructure itself publishing events in standard formats.
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