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Enterprise Software for Linux?
Ben Mayer asks: "I
work for a company that is looking to start using Linux on our
servers along side of the Windows 2000 boxes that we already have. We
have been looking at tools like HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli for
package distribution and backups. They both support Windows and a
variety of U*IX but not Linux. I have spent a couple of days
searching but have not found any products that support Win 2k and
Linux and are of enterprise quality. Is Linux lacking in this
area?"
You'll only be sorry once you see the price tag for licensing and services.
Really.
Ouch...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Is to scrub Linux and go with a Solaris variant. The software you mention is easily available for these platforms. The point of Linux is that it is a free O/S, but remember that the cost of a proprietory Unix is only a teeny-tiny fraction of the overall licensing fees for the Enterprise software you require. You get what you pay for, I guess.
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
Tivoli supports Linux for Inventory, Software Distribution and Distributed Monitoring.
Be aware, though, that enterprise management products get very expensive. My (rather large) organization is doing a Tivoli rollout that will cost about millions of dollars over 4-5 years and require a staff of about 10 to manage. This includes licensing, hardware costs and consulting time.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
OpenView and Tivoli are for either very large budgets, or very large, distributed companies. NNM is pretty neat and all. It discovers your network for you, draws a really inaccurate map that you have to manually tweak. Then you find out that most of the features you want aren't part of NNM. You have to buy ITO (now called VantagePoint, IIRC). Then, you want to graph loads and network utilization. Guess what? Another $5-15k down the tubes. As far as I've been told Tivoli is the same way.
My point is that no matter which of those two you buy, you're going to need to do some substantial work to get them set up properly. Why not invest your time into something that is cheaper and, in most cases where you're monitoring
Where I work, I ousted OpenView and replaced it with NetSaint and Cricket. I also wrote a bunch of other CGI scripts to search my syslog archives and things of that nature. They aren't very difficult to maintain once you get the hang of it, and they're free.
If you're really set on something grand, I've been keeping an eye on OpenNMS which is more to the scale of NNM or Tivoli. Give their page a readover - they're nearing a 1.0 release, last I checked. Remember, you can always spend that cool million that's burning the hole in your pocket to hire the lead developer of one of those projects to come in to your company and 'Make it So.'
Good Luck!
Egads, how could you mention SMS in the same sentence as any other Enterprise management suite? I can't count how many companies I've helped rip out SMS and replace it with anything else.
:)
SMS only works in huge corporations where MS feels like enough money is being spent that they are willing to send a team of SMS developers over.
(If anyone's interested, that's also how they got NT 3.x/4.x into Fortune 100 co's like AT&T, UPRR, BellAtlantic, etc. The big boys which MS lists as using NT aren't using the same NT that you and I buy. Fortunately that's pretty much, finally, changed as of Win2k).
Not to mention SMS doesn't support Linux and so isn't even on-topic for the question above.
Geez...
And just to be on-topic myself - go with Tivoli. My answer would have been OpenView as the best of a bad bunch a few years ago, but Tivoli's really come along since then.