HP Equips Management Tools for Multi-OS Support
In a move designed to give service providers more flexibility in deploying and managing Web-based applications, Hewlett-Packard Company has added multi-OS support to several of its management tools.
The changes, which affect HP’s Toptools, Servicecontrol Manager, Process Resource Manager, and the HP-UX Workload Manager, are intended to reduce the workload of individual system administrators by allowing resources to be provisioned automatically across multiple platforms.
According to HP, the changes represent its ongoing effort to build a platform independent management offering and make it the only vendor with a tightly integrated multi-OS management approach for Windows, HP-UX, and Linux.
“Today what we want to do is offer one framework for how you do multi-system management,” says an HP spokesperson close to the project.
The tools that these changes impact reside a layer below HP’s OpenView systems management offering. And while they are intended to be used as standalone products, they are fully integratable with the OpenView offering.
Toptools, HP’s Web-based management product, now features revision management with automatic updates, enhanced discovery and inventory management. It also has a new database export tool and SQL import tool allowing advanced data manipulation, and increased multi-OS support, including HP-UX, Windows XP and Linux.
HP Servicecontrol Manager, a systems management tool with Web-enabled and command line interfaces, offers new multi-OS manageability, increased scalability up to 1,024 nodes, and increased security through authentication and encryption.
HP Process Resource Manager for allocating CPU, memory and disk I/O on HP-UX systems now offers improved system utilization and dynamic reallocations for Oracle environments by co-functioning with Oracle Database Resource Manager.
And HP-UX Workload Manager is now expanding its capabilities to operate in a high-availability, clustered environment by integrating with HP MC/Serviceguard, HP's high-availability clustering solution for HP-UX-based servers. Also, it allows utility integration to utilize instant Capacity on Demand resources. ICOD enables the activation of additional processor capacity addressing fast IT fluctuation needs typically found in an Internet environment.
Toptools is bundled with every HP Intel IA-32-based server and is available immediately. Both Servicecontrol Manager and the Process Resource Manager, which are bundled with every HP-UX-based server, will be available in September of 2001.
HP-UX Workload Manager is available immediately and starts at an estimated U.S. list price of $5,000.
With the enhancement’s HP has made to Toptools, Servicecontrol Manager, Process Resource Manager, HP-UX Workload Manager, an HP spokesperson says, “We have put a framework in place that allows you to launch applications simultaneously on huge server environments.”
For more information, visit www.hp.com (new window>