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Imagine being able to securely monitor, control and report on the performance and availability of workstations and servers from a PDA.
Little known startup ProductivityNet Inc. intends to provide administrators with just that capability in the latest release of its ActiveManage tool, which will debut at Networld + Interop in Las Vegas next month.
ActiveManage provides a mixed bag of workstation and server management functions, ranging from alerting, troubleshooting, controlling, and fixing performance problems to reporting on workstation and server usage. All of the functions can be performed from either a PDA or a Web browser.
ProductivityNet in Troy, N.Y. is taking on small and large competitors alike with ActiveManage 2.0, but claiming a unique capability to perform all management functions from a variety of PDAs using a fully encrypted link—without memory restrictions according to CEO Vincent Pasceri.
“We have a list of pre-set options you can define. If a Web server goes down, you can say perform these actions: restart a service, reboot a server, kill a process, log off a user. And you can specify a command to run, or a batch file or a script, so you can automate other things,” he said.
ActiveManage is made up of a management server, agents, and the Web or wireless user interface. It can manage Microsoft Corp.s Windows NT, 2000 and XP workstations and servers as well as Linux and Sun Microsystems Inc.s Solaris machines. ProductivityNet also intends to add support for routers in a later release.
The tool also includes an alert system, performance counters that can watch for thresholds being exceeded, and provides for automated, rules-based responses to system problems.
ActiveManage competes with offerings from Sonic Mobility, Inc. Opalis Software Inc. as well as large players such as Intel Corp.s LANDesk, but those vendors “dont have the wireless access,” said Martha Young, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates Inc. in Boulder, Colo.
Young believes that ProductivityNet is also uniquely aggressive in its pricing.
A starter package that includes one host, one agent server and 10 workstation agents is $750. Additional server agents are $499 each and workstation agents are $25, but those prices reduce in higher volumes.