Unicenter TNG aims for total enterprise management but falls just short
- By Eric Hammond
- Feb 02, 2000
Government agencies are prime candidates for enterprise management tools,
given that many of them have many heterogeneous systems distributed across
the country and even around the world.
By carefully implementing enterprise management tools, agencies can reduce
the cost of administering information technology infrastructure and
increase service levels.
The key word here is "carefully."
In this second installment of our series on enterprise management sofware,
we'll look at cost-effective ways to deploy Computer Associates
International Inc.'s Unicenter TNG, a suite of tools for managing
enterprise IT infrastructure.
The comprehensive approach that TNG takes towards enterprise management is
far different than the first product we reviewed in our series, Intel
Corp.'s LANDesk Management Suite 6.3 (FCW, Nov. 15, 1999), which is
designed only to manage desktops, not network or other system
infrastructure.
We checked out Unicenter TNG 2.1 at Computer Associates' Denver-based
Virtual Enterprise Room, one of several interconnected facilities around
the country that CA maintains for demonstrating TNG in a simulated
enterprise environment. (While Version 2.2 began shipping during our
testing, Version 2.1 contains most of the significant functionality in
TNG.)
TNG is sold as a base package with options that handle specific management
chores. The base package includes autodiscovery, which locates IT
infrastructure on your network, as well as system monitoring utilities,
which use software agents and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) to
monitor systems, workflow tools, security tools and performance management
tools.
The optional packages for TNG handle tasks ranging from software delivery
to asset management to remote control of devices and
software. There is optional support for different applications,
such
as those from SAP America Inc. and PeopleSoft Inc., and
different
databases. While options for the applications and databases are
nice, remote control and asset management are two add-ons that
most
organizations should implement first to show a quick return on
investment. In our view, CA could make TNG more attractive "out
of
the box" by bundling these two options with the base product.
CA offers three interfaces to TNG: a 2-D interface, a 3-D
interface
and a World Wide Web interface. We looked at TNG mostly through
the
2-D interface, which is likely to be the choice of those who
have to
use TNG every day. The 3-D interface is slick, but perhaps too
much
so: It starts with a spinning globe and enables the user to
drill
down through continents and then cities to buildings, floors
and
individual pieces of hardware, flying inside the devices to
locate
problems. It looks great, but setting it up to resemble your
actual
environment will take some effort.
Using the 2-D map of the simulated enterprise, we were able to
see
examples of TNG's capabilities, including the ability to
monitor
vast networks from a single console, drill down to problem
components, detect and respond to events on the network, and
execute
commands remotely on systems on the network.
The thing to remember about TNG is that in its base
configuration,
it provides a framework for enterprise management and little
else.
What you do with that framework is up to you. In other words,
TNG
like other enterprise management tools requires significant
upfront investment with a difficult-to-pin-down return on
investment.
The upfront investment comes in the form of time spent planning
the hows, whats and whys of what you want to manage. Shops that have
infrastructure that facilitates deployment centralized
log-in
scripts, modern hardware and software and that can identify
quick
hits that give the most return, like remote control, should
experience wildly successful enterprise management
implementations.
To maximize the benefits of TNG, agencies and departments will
want
to carefully plan which elements to deploy. Some pieces of this
puzzle are easier to put in place than others. Remote control,
an
option any TNG customer should select, is a slam-dunk. It's
easily
deployed and configured and provides an instant payback
reduced
administrator visits to remote machines.
Software delivery may also make sense for your agency. At the
Anniston Army Depot in Alabama, for example, the TNG
implementation
included the software delivery option, which allows for
centralized
management of software installations across the depot's 1,300
desktops. While elements of Anniston's TNG deployment will
certainly
take a while to complete, software delivery provides a quick
return,
allowing one technician to configure and deploy numerous
software
packages to all of the systems on the network.
However, other options are more problematic. Managing printers,
for
example, is not so simple. TNG provides the framework that
would
allow you to monitor printers and print queues and respond
either
with messages to the appropriate administrator or with
automated
tasks when certain events occur on a printer. But the
functionality
isn't provided out of the box. It must be programmed by the TNG
administrator.
CA's background is in systems management, and TNG in places
shows
its roots as a systems management tool. It has strong
functionality
for monitoring systems and alerting administrators or
automatically
responding to any number of events. Likewise, many of the
options
for TNG involve systems issues, such as user management or
database
and application management.
On the network side, TNG is weaker. It is capable of monitoring
and
alerting administrators to events such as network equipment
crashes,
but TNG
like the other enterprise-management products is
unable to manage such equipment. CA leaves this to the
tools provided by network vendors. A true enterprise management
tool
should provide for the integrated management of network
routers,
hubs and switches. Alas, all the solutions we're aware of on
the
market require you to bolt together solutions from different
vendors.
To be fair, TNG includes support for quality of service
functionality in network hardware. QOS is an evolving
collection of
tools and standards for ensuring given levels of access to
resources
on the network by, for example, prioritizing network traffic
associated with a certain application. Assuming QOS-compatible
hardware and software is deployed across the enterprise,
network
traffic can be prioritized based on a number of factors. Since
QOS
is pretty much meaningless unless it can be applied across the
enterprise, an enterprise management tool such as TNG is the
logical
place for QOS management to take place.
In short, Unicenter TNG is an enterprise management framework
that
can help IT administrators contain management costs and provide
guaranteed service levels to their clients. It is strong on the
systems, database and application management side but provides
less
network management functionality than most organizations
require.
TND, the next generation of TNG, will provide features
including a
fully object-oriented repository for enterprise management
information as well as increased use of Neugents, CA's
proactive
artificial intelligence-based agents for predicting and
managing
problems before they happen.
Large agencies implementing enterprise management have to
consider
TNG as a possible solution. Smaller organizations might find
value
in TNG as well, especially because many of TNG's features are
available as point solutions that can solve critical problems
in
managing IT infrastructure.
Hammond is a free-lance writer based in Denver. He can be reached at [email protected]