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Tivoli Thinks About Linux
An anonymous reader wrote in to say "In this story
Tivoli refers to the enterprise management software and a business unit of
IBM. Tivoli is not only considering porting the gateway portion
of the Tivoli Framework (the gateway allows management of workstations,
windows, netware, os/2, as/400, etc.), but making it the
only gateway platform supported!!! Thus every
Tivoli implementation would require Linux. It would be important to note that
currently many flavors of Unix and WinNT are the supported gateway platforms for Tivoli Framework 3.6 and there is no support for Linux at all right now. "
Is that necessarily a good thing? It'd be nice to see freedom of OS choice prevail over freedom of Linux distribution choice for their application. I'm all for Linux, don't get me wrong, but I don't think forcing people into using it (or anything) is a good thing.
Don't want to turn into a you-know-whosoft, you know..
I think while this is a GREAT thing for Linux, I have to agree that it should not be the ONLY platform for implemantation. Freedom of choice is what Linux has been about and Tivoli should follow suit. Right now we run it on AIX and it kicks butt! But, it would sure be nice to have a Linux portion added. It's great to see an Enterprise level application moving in this direction.
"Klaatu, verada, necktie!" -Ash
Linux is free, remember? They can bundle Linux with Tivoli if folks want. Think of it as a very sophisticated runtime environment.
You're certainly not forcing people to buy it, so comparisons with a certain large Washington state software company are non sequitor.
-- Alastair
Not quite the same thing. There are plenty of apps that run exclusively on certain operating systems. Tivoli should have the same freedom to innovate and choose a particular OS to target and support, especially if that strategy gives them an advantage:
From the article -
"If the only gateway we supported was Linux, it would be cheap, said chief technology officer Tim Bishop. "It would make configuration testing much easier and it would be easier to support."
I hardly think that Tivoli has a monopoly on network management applications. Whereas it can be argued, indeed, is being argued, that another company has such a monopoly on operating systems.
Besides, if Linus became like Bill, we'd just give him a noogie and tell him to stop it.
John Hebert
"Classic UFO's
I really, really can't wait. Linux NetView.
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If Tivoli is supporting the general management stuff, that means ADSM for Linux. That means that the Linux could run the ADSM and spool the data for NT, UNIXes, and so on. That means a bulletproof management platform as part of a package. Do y'all realize how many awful copies of HPhUX OpenView has sold?
That means that Linux would get serious jukebox and tape vault support, probably stuff for the big EMC coffins. Because it needs to be watched. That means that 3Com and Madge and Fore and Intel will be releasing networking tools that work with Linux and interface with the Tivoli tools.
That means that SAP with DB2 or Informix (or Oracle or Sysbase if you must) will be able to pull some serious numbers, especially with the JFS coming in one descrition or another. And all of this will interface with the management tools, and will bring in batching stuff, financial stuff, and possibly a Linux Workload Manager (ohhhhhh -- kids -- you have no idea how sweet that would be). That means more serious database tools for Linux, because the large storage would be there, with the backup, with the databases, all managed. That means SAS tools. That means clustering and more VMs.
That means that I might get a chance to work with Linux/SAP/DB2 combos backed up with ADSM on DLT libraries, terabyte storage on EMCs and SAS tools to mine it, all controlled with the Tivoli stuff reducing the 04:00 pages, and all making Linux the simple and clear choice for hard core ERP. All with a workload manager like MVS.
Guys, this is the entering wedge. This is the beginning of the end. I predict that in five years Microsoft will be 1/20th the size it is today and will be acquired by someone else for legacy service contract support. Perhaps IBM will get their revenge after all.
The next big thing will be when one of the large UNIX companies (I am betting Compaq) opens up their UNIX code to the world under GPL or close and decides to contribute heavily to Linux to cut their development costs. Then another (I am betting one of the smaller ones, like DG), then another (HP?), and then the largely NT big iron companies will start to come over (NCR, anyone).
Savor the sweet taste of cold revenge
I think they would have difficulty trying to get everyone to use just Linux, in companies and deperatments where they currently have no Linux installations, and hence so sys-admin. This is for enterprise level stuff, so this is important.
At the moment, all they seem definate about is adding Linux support, to their current list. Migrating to Linux-only seems more like wishful thinking in the short/medium term.
(gripe mode on) If you're going to post stories like this, why couldn't you post one I submitted the other day - Sun licensing their JavaServer Pages/servlet source code to the Apache Group, and letting Apache distribute that source code under the Apache license. see the Jakarta home page and this JavaWorld article(grip mode off)
True, but two points. First, the Linux box is only the gateway, not the management console or the managed boxes. You can still manage things from your NT desktop box, and manage NT, Unix and other types of boxes. Second, those large customers need Tivoli. It's much like word processing: if you need to use MS Word, you buy whatever OS MS Word runs on. Considering that it's one box out of hundreds that needs to be replaced if Tivoli goes to a Linux-only gateway, that's not a big deal.
And I doubt those large customers will mind not having to worry about the management gateway crashing on a weekly basis.
What problems are you having with Tivoli? It looks to me like you have nothing really to say, but a one-liner's worth of FUD.
On the other hand, if we compare to proprietary Unix OSs, then the software costs are much lower. Unix software is generally considered expensive - this is often true for a single user, or small number of users, but often it becomes very cheap (per user) for an enterprise setup. For example, the RRP for Solaris workstation is about $400, though you can get it much cheaper than this - free for non-commercial usage. That's obviously more than Windows. However, getting an infinite user license for Solaris costs $1500 or something, meaning if you have 1000 users in your company, it costs $1.50 for each one for the OS. NT workstation is $250 (or something like that) per user, and you don't really get volume discounts.
Putting it on a different level... for the high-end/datacenter level, the hardware could easily cost several million. Compared to this, a couple of hundred for the cost of the OS is nothing. Besides which, the cost of the proprietary OS will be included in the cost of the hardware, effectively for free. (I believe you can get Sun hardware without the OS, which does give you a small discount - the cost of the CDs, books and other media, which is about $20 or something)
On another level... the cost of migrating can be pretty huge - first, you need to re-train your sys-admin (or chuck out the old ones, and get in some new) which can be pretty painful. Ditto if you have software developers. Then you need to re-train your staff, port your specialist software (if applies), etc etc. You also have to figure in the cost of downtime while this is all going on. This is why people are still using 'ancient' mainframes - because a) the risk of moving is too much, and b) it probably does what you need already anyway.
It is important to remember that they are talking about only Linux just on the middle server. This box is responsible for communication between the agents on the end-point managed machines (servers doing the actual work or workstations used by employees) and the software used by the people responsible for managing the network. In other words, Linux will be run on a box that has a very singular purpose, data collecting and playing middle man and runs only software from Tivoli. Usually no one sits at or tries to run another application on it.
For this reason, supporting one OS at this level is a decent idea. Tivoli will not have test fewer combinations of OS's used. Their management environment is already complex considering the different types of end-point boxes they can handle (workstations to high-end servers and mainframes). Now communication to these end-points will be coming from only one OS and one code tree.
To me, this is kind of like choosing Linux as an embedded OS becuase in most cases it will be serving one purpose and that is all. Nice, closed, and manageable.
Users lose little or nothing because of this. The network management people still get their NT, 98, Solaris, or whatever in front of them on their desk.
Still this approach to integrating Linux is backwards from the normal. Usually, a company would add Linux support on the periphery. In this case that would mean allowing Linux to be a managed end-point. Minimal risks. Instead, they are yanking it in and counting on it.
Before, if their customers had chosen NT to run this server and NT puked on them, the could say that it was the customer's fault because the chose NT. Tivoli has no way out here if Linux fails, except to fix the problems in Linux that are causing the failures, resulting in a better OS for us.
Heh, 4 feet of books is right. I just started on a project working with this thing, and I've spent my first week reading manuals and doing cbt's. It's basically a software package for maintaining most aspects in an enterprise of computers. You can distribute software, manage users and groups, monitor events (like log file entries), run or schedule jobs, monitor the network, and a whole slew of other things. All of this from a single console or parse it up any way you like. You can have multiple admins with different privledges and areas to watch over. You can run it on several varieties of unix, 95, 98, and nt. No support for the mac yet, and as you can see, linux is in the works. The good thing about working with this thing is the labs you get to play in, and all the travel to customer sites installing it :-)
Isn't Tivoli owned by IBM? They might make a good "partner".
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I think this is not only a great step for Linux, but a great step for the Enterprise Server Industry. The middleman machine is once more going to be a fast as hell one-trick bitty box, but now it will be completely reconfigurable when no longer useful as a gateway.
Summary: Good Thing
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(sourceCode == freeSpeech)