Enterprise Management

Enterprise Management software, especially for one of your size can get very expensive. The solution you eventually choose should be based on two things: your requirements, and your budget.

You need to start with a requirements document (i.e. what are all the management tasks that you need to accomplish). Within the requirements document you need to include the organization of your company (locations, numbers of client desktops at each location, numbers of servers at each location, locations of servers hosting business-critical processes, administrative functions to be performed at each location, number of domains, types of links between sites, etc.), as well as any constraints (i.e. certain administrators are allowed to perform onlycertain tasks, etc)

Your requirements document will help drive the specific questions you ask each vendor. To help evaluate each vendors offering, you should take your list of management tasks to be accomplished and prioritize it. It will help further to probably divide it into three major sections: Must have, Like to have, Wish list (or some similar breakout).

Your requirements document will also allow you to deal with vendors consistently (i.e. giving all vendors the same set of requirements.

Another major area to consider will be vendor support: costs, how support costs are handled and charged (per-call, subscription, guaranteed number of calls, etc.), expected wait times, quality, availability, etc. You might even ask forreferences of other companies that use a specific solution.

As for specific solutions, 2 of the big names are CA (Computer Associates) and Aelita. However, there are many other solutions from many other vendors that may meet your needs. You mayfind that instead of a single integrated solution from a single vendor, pieces from several different vendors better meet your needs (and your budget).

Good Luck.

TIVOLI

IBM's Tivoli, in it's diferent flavors, would give great enterprise management solution. Check at www.tivoli.com

Jose P. Mir
jpm@jpmir.net

TIVOLI

IBM's Tivoli, in it's diferent flavors, would give great enterprise management solution. Check at www.tivoli.com

Jose P. Mir
jpm@jpmir.net

Dear Mr. Jackson:

When we answer questions the spirit is always to give a hand to our peers in assisting them with tips about ?how-to-do's?. This tips are, mostly of the times, based on personal and professional experiences, and could help to walk through technical steps a bit easier than without them. This is a voluntary task, so while I ask you to think about if being rude in your comments is worth I apologize for my past lack of effort.
You shouldn?t wait for a detailed description on a complex and so important aspect like Enterprise Management which teach you the topic. There are many aspects to consider and your particular situation (IT Infrastructure and Business Project) will play a primordial role in it. So, when I?ve seen yourquestion I supposed you need some guidance about which vendors to look for. Tivoli products are number one for Enterprise Management when you need a strong and reliable solution. If you go to it?s web site (www.tivoli.com) you will get an idea of what Enterprise Management is from a vendor?s point of view. Whit this info you could make you own analysis and trace the proper guidelines to find the better solution for your company.
If you need a broader vision about what is Enterprise Management , from the IT?s point of view, you could find many text books and vendor?s white papers. I recommend you to take a look to the ?An Introduction to Tivoli Enterprise? IBM Redbook (sg24-5494-00), which gives a lot of considerations from inside a real product. Even if you don?t want to know anything about IBM, Tivoli or anything regardless big and/or blue stuff, this Redbook will give you a very good starting point. Just go to www.redbooks.ibm.com and type ?tivoli? in the search box.

Jose P Mir
jpm@jpmir.net

On the other hand; if you are looking for a smaller but powerful option, for a multi server environment, you should check Novell?s Managewise (www.novell.com/products/managewise), and think about using Novell?s eDirectory technology. You will see that ?controlling? hundreds of servers and thousands of desktops could be very easy.
About Aelita Software, it?s oriented only to Active Directory technology, which, from my point of view is many megaparsecs back eDirectory Technology. Managewise and eDirectory can be deployed on pure Windows Networks, as well as mixed environments. I can see for the information you give that your company has an important infrastructure, and believe me, you should not want to be attached to a so rigid architecture as Active Directory.
CA is a good provider for Enterprise Management solutions, which could be ranked half way between Tivoli and Managewise for the solution of medium companies like yours, from a IT point of view.
You will find that the investment necessary to deploy the different solutions is very variable, but results will be variable too. You must focus on objectives and trace, like in every other IT project with professional management, a ROI or any other metric that let your business executives compare benefits in corporate revenue for different scenarios. Remember that Enterprise Management is not only a report tool to know how good is the infrastructure doing; it?s a preventive maintenance and troubleshoot tool too. A failure inthe system could cost more than the difference between the deployed tool and the one which could have prevented the failure; and you will have to live with the cheaper tool for many years! (or until they fire you).

Jose P Mir
jpm@jpmir.net