Enterprise management rivals BMC Software Inc. and IBMs Tivoli Systems are branching out into several hot areas in search of new growth.
BMC Tuesday announced support in several new areas in a shotgun approach intended to hit Linux, the desktop and Microsoft Corp.s Windows 2000 servers.
Tivoli, meanwhile, aimed squarely at Web management in an effort to provide remote monitoring and troubleshooting into Web servers, Web application servers, Java middleware and applications.
BMC, in its first foray down to the desktop, will provide monitoring for critical remote desktops, such as those used by stock traders or the CEO.
BMC responded to demand for such monitoring and remote management particularly from the financial services and the energy field. Continuous uptime is critical for users who analyze geologic and seismic data, according to Carl Coken, vice president and general manager of BMCs Patrol platform unit in Houston.
BMC also laid out a road map for further extending its support of Linux across its various management tools and across different platforms. BMC last month released a new version of its Patrol for Unix that adds Linux support for managing the operating system. By the end of the year, BMC will support Linux servers with its Mainview tool. Early next year the company will release Patrol for Linux xSeries on the mainframe, and later in the year, BMC will support Linux desktops with its Patrol availability and performance management software.
BMC also released its Patrol for Microsoft Windows Servers, which works across Windows NT 4 and Windows 2000 servers. It provides availability management, manages disk quotas, and provides management of file and print services as well as Active Directory.
Across the state in Austin, Texas, Tivoli announced the release of its Tivoli Web Component Manager. The new tool provides more fine-grained management and control of Web components, rather than the broad brush it had used to paint the status and health of Web servers across an enterprise.
The availability and performance management tool can manage the hardware, operating system and Web software—including Java Virtual Machines–across Web servers and Web application servers. It provides access to such details as servlet load times, total hit counts, log-in and failed log-in counts, server failure counts, system memory usage, requests per second, bytes received and sent, and memory allocated, and it can monitor system CPU usage for individual servers and across multiple servers.
The tool, made up of an agent installed on managed servers and a browser-based console, supports such Web servers as Apache, Microsoft IIS, IBMs WebSphere and AIX, and Sun Microsystems Inc.s Solaris, and it will support Linux next month. BEA WebLogic support is due in December, as is a patch for supporting Microsofts Active Directory. IPlanet support is due early next year.
