Systems Management and Monitoring

Converted Feed to Feedburner

As I did with my main weblog's feed, I've converted the feed for this weblog to a Feedburner feed. I setup a redirect for the old feed, so you should need to change anything, your aggregater should pick up the changes.

The new URL for this weblog's feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/SystemsManagementAndMonitoring. I've spliced in my bookmarks that I tag as being related to systems management, so you should see more frequent posts thanks to those. Most of the posts on this weblog are just links to articles anyhow.

If you experience any problems, please contact me (leave a comment or email me).

Security Driving Systems Management

Miles sent the endpoint management RFP to about a dozen vendors - some such as BigFix Technologies known primarily for patch management and others such as ManageSoft, Marimba and Novadigm that do patch plus configuration, inventory and more. The RFP had a twist, Miles says, noting that almost half of the 160 capability criteria questions related to security - threat detection and vulnerability assessment, for example - are not typically handled by patch management vendors.

3Com Buys Tipping Point

3Com has signed an agreement to purchase the security company TippingPoint for $340 million.

The purchase is aimed at strengthening 3Com's secure, converged voice and data networking solutions by adding TippingPoint's network-based Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) to its portfolio. TippingPoint's IPS provides application protection, infrastructure protection and performance protection for enterprises, government agencies, service providers and academic institutions.

"3Com to buy Security Company TippingPoint"

Another Discovery/Mgmt App

Collage works by discovering and inventorying a company's servers and then organizing those servers in tiers. It creates a set of operating system and application images, and deploys these images to the servers. Start-up readies server mgmt. pack

Change Management, Topology Discovery

"Topology Discovery allows you to populate and maintain a single configuration management database," Balentine said.

"In other words, it lets customers put all their asset-management information onto a single database. The advantage is that you can automate how you model the enterprise's I.T. services topology."

"BMC Launches Change Management Tool"

Microsoft Systems Management News

Hamilton said that future Microsoft management products, namely Systems Management Server and Microsoft Operations Manager, will be designed to monitor performance of data center components by tracking Microsoft-defined "models." The models will describe the health of an application, its configuration and the tasks it supposed to perform, he said. "Gates announces new Windows update tool"

Also, CRN has an article on the unfortunately named WUS, MS's soon-to-come patch management software.

More on Integration

This pressure to become faster, more secure, more reliable, and more nimble has directly affected a technology category that was left for dead just a few years ago. This is the IT-service management suite. For years, BMC Software, Computer Associates, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM battled, trying to sell point solutions into the enterprise for network and systems, storage, security, or operations management. Problem was, these products didn't always mesh together well.

Now that we're living in a world of increased collaboration and integration, these vendors are being asked, or might I say more directly, forced by customers to come to market with a much more integrated approach. And, it seems that they're responding.

"Integrated Suites, IT's Newest Push "

Mapping IT

The mapping module's ability to show how distributed applications are affected by configuration changes is "amazing," said Mercury user David Pinkus, senior director of software at the Apollo Group Inc., in Phoenix. "To correlate the change in your environment and see the actual performance impact of it from the end-user perspective takes capacity planning and performance management to a new level," Pinkus said. "Mercury Adds Mapping to Performance Suite"