CA SANITI illustrates the problem with management frameworks

1999-07-14

Enterprise management frameworks, since their inception in the early nineties, have been seen as the ”ultimate answer” to the questions posed by managing the applications, hardware and network devices that make up our corporate infrastructures. This would be true if the world stood still, but unfortunately it does not.

CA announced yesterday an initiative for the management of Storage Area Networks, known as SANITI or SAN integrated technology initiative. Essentially this equated to enabling the management of SAN hardware by CA’s UniCenter management framework.

Once again, it would appear that devices are rolling onto the market while framework vendors are struggling to keep up. No date has been given for the release of SANITI, though hardware vendors such as Compaq and Hewlett Packard are already shipping their SAN devices. Network managers must also plan time to reconfigure their management architectures to take account of the new devices.

Unfortunately, it will ever be thus. Increasing use of the Internet, wireless devices and the arrival of appliances to the market at an ever increasing rate are coupling together to transform our infrastructure topologies and make obsolete our modes of operation. For example, uptime is only one criterion to be judged for an E-Commerce site – throughput, response time and transaction management are also issues to be addressed against a backdrop of new types of application such as application servers.

Investors in enterprise management software should recognise that such frameworks can only solve part of the problem, and that deployment is not a one-shot operation. Best of breed approaches can help, but go against the “one size fits all” policy which goes towards justifying the inflated price of frameworks. Frameworks can help, particularly to manage the integrity of the core infrastructure. However they cannot be expected to keep up with all developments in the domains which they are supposed to be managing.

(First published 14 July 1999)