Tivoli Customers Hear New Plans for SANs

PHILADELPHIA (05/26/2000) - On the heels of flat first-quarter financial results, Tivoli Systems Inc. is mounting a wide line of attack on the network management market.

This week at its Planet Tivoli customer conference, the IBM Corp. subsidiary announced a variety of storage-area network products and SAN alliances. In addition, Tivoli executives detailed plans to add more capabilities to mainframe-based management tools.

Tivoli will continue to supply companies with e-business products ranging from tools to manage mainframes to those that handle PalmPilots, Senior Vice President Bob Yellin told a keynote audience at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

User reaction to the roadmap has been generally positive.

Karen Nickelson, an IS manager at Hewitt Associates, is particularly pleased with the way Tivoli is beginning to tightly integrate its product line with IBM software such as NetView. Hewitt, a large benefits management company in Lincolnshire, Illinois, has a 12,000-user network and a variety of Tivoli products to handle software distribution, events management and other tasks.

While generally happy with Tivoli, Nickelson says the company's services organization needs to reduce the time it takes to resolve problems.

Moreover, when the company rolls out new products, it must be careful not to sacrifice quality. Nickelson says she also would like to have greater user input on how Tivoli shapes its product direction.

Storage Manager upgrades

At the conference, the company made its biggest thunder over Tivoli Storage Manager 4.1, which handles automatic high-speed data backup.

The product also has a so-called LAN-free management feature, which lets servers and storage devices move data through SAN pipes instead of over LAN channels. The company hopes this will help companies cope with the huge amounts of data generated by business-to-business traffic.

Also coming to Storage Manager is the ability to exploit EMC Corp.'s TimeFinder, a software tool in the EMC Symmetrix storage server that takes snapshots of the data being stored. These snapshots are used to do high-speed backup of data for heavy-duty applications such as SAP AG's enterprise resource planning software. Tivoli also will provide a development tool kit to tie SAN management tools to NetView, the company's enterprise management application.

Tivoli Storage Manager 4.1 starts at $2,000 and will be available in July. It runs on Unix, Windows NT and 2000, and OS/390.

Tivoli also detailed improvements to its NetView mainframe-based product that will let users more effectively manage IP applications and Unix hosts.

Enhancements to Tivoli NetView for OS/390 1.3 will let IS staff gather Simple Network Management Protocol data off the mainframe's IP stack on items such as network interfaces and traffic statistics.

The NetView console will also be able to communicate with another mainframe in an all-IP network via tn3270 sessions. Additionally, NetView will handle automated management of distributed Unix hosts, Tivoli says.

Tivoli also announced that it will offer its software for rent through 2ndWave Inc., an application service provider that specializes in service to IT shops.

Tivoli already offers rented applications through the firm Triactive Inc., but 2nd Wave will expand the number of products offered and will be more geared to larger enterprise networks, Tivoli says.

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