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Along with outlining its strategy for adaptive management for IT infrastructure, Hewlett-Packard Co. on Tuesday will introduce a series of new and enhanced OpenView tools, which provide the foundation for its adaptive management vision.
HP will move its OpenView tools beyond traditional monitoring and alerting to be able to intelligently respond to changing demands by re-provisioning resources in the data center.
The new OpenView products, which will debut at the HP Software Universe user event in Lisbon, Portugal, address four key areas of the strategy: Web services, network management, Windows management as well as the OpenView community of partners and services.
HPs OpenView Web Service Management Engine will extend management functions beyond Web services platforms such as BEA WebLogic or IBM WebSphere servers to manage the Web service itself. The engine will allow users to provision the Web services by intercepting Simple Object Access Protocol and WSDL-based Web service transactions.
At the same time HP added two new Smart Plug-ins to manage Sun Open Network Environment (Sun ONE) Web application servers as well as Microsofts .Net Server 2003 edition. HP also enhanced the Smart Plug-ins it announced last summer for the WebLogic and WebSphere servers. The enhanced Smart Plug-ins can determine application queue lengths inside the server.
HP also added new OpenView Smart Plug-ins to manage SOAP and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration servers along with a Web services management engine that allows users to plug an agent into a SOAP server that can intercept Web services transactions brokered through SOAP. Such functionality enables the automated provisioning of Web services based on rules or models for subscription-based Web services. It also enables the software to tag the transactions at a SOAP level to monitor Web services transactions piece by piece, as they move from one compound task to another.
HPs in-depth support for managing Web services is “a little bit ahead of demand,” believes Rich Ptak, founder of Ptak & Associates Inc. in Amherst, N.H. “There arent many Web services applications out at this point. But as the development activity increases, there will be a need for it,” he added.
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In the network management area, HP OpenView Network Node Manager 6.4 and Network Node Manager Extended Topology 2.0 are the first major network management tools to support Internet Protocol Version 6.0.
IP V6, completed by the Internet Engineer Task Force some time ago to address an expected shortage of IP addresses, has seen little adoption to date. But HP chose to move forward in its support to back implementations in China and Japan, where there is a shortage of IP addresses, as well as for mobile carriers who are moving to IP V6, according to OpenView officials.
The new NNM releases also address root cause analysis by adding intelligent network diagnostics intended to provide more accurate results when network events flood the management console with redundant alerts. The new releases are due early next year.
HP is also enhancing its OpenView Operations for Windows tool, which manages both J2EE and .Net applications. The new version adds Smart Plug-ins for Microsofts Active Directory Services, which include new visualization technology that shows administrators the topology of how different components of an Active Directory Service interact with each other. HP is seeking patents on that unique visualization technology to view how ADC components have been deployed.
HP will also announce a new partnership with Aelita Software Corp., which provides configuration and provisioning of ADS. HP also extended its partnership with Sun Microsystems Inc. to manage Sun ONE environments, partnered with ManageSoft Corp. and Altiris Inc. for desktop management and added several new security partners including CheckPoint Software Technologies Inc.
HP also enhanced its Customer Care Premier service to add greater flexibility.
Beyond this round of new and enhanced tools, the OpenView unit will deliver additional functions against its adaptive management strategy.
“Were going to consistently announce software over the next 18 months to address virtualization, automated provisioning, business service-level agreements, integration of business processes to operations and service management,” said an OpenView official in Fort Collins, Colo.