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NEWS&ANALYSIS BMC, Quest tackle DB2 TOOLS BOOST MANAGEMENT IN HETEROGENEOUS ENVIRONMENT By Lisa Vaas Users of ibm’s db2 software can turn to tools from BMC Software Inc. and Quest Software Inc. to manage the enterprise DBMS. BMC, as part of its Project Golden Gate initiative to enable data management in a heterogeneous environment, has added support for IBM’s DB2 Universal Database in its SmartDBA performance, administration and recovery tools. Working in the same vein, Quest is shipping Quest Central for DB2 3, which is management software for DB2 that features deep diagnostic capabilities for IBM’s database partitioning technology and support for heterogeneous environments. Both database management products were rolled out at the annual International DB2 Users Group Americas conference in Las Vegas last week. BMC’s tools include SmartDBA Performance Management for DB2 UDB 2.5, which provides event management, diagnostics, visualization, administration, Tool tracks network changes By Paula Musich The second release of Rendition Networks Inc.’s TrueControl network configuration tool focuses on greater extensibility and ease of administration. The software, which allows users to track and better control configuration changes in routers, switches, firewalls and load balancers in large, enterprise networks, can automatically detect when changes are made and notify appropriate network operators, officials said. Released last week, True- Control works across multiple vendors’ networking 22 eWEEK n MAY 26, 2003 space management and tuning of DB2 UDB environments. The software integrates common alerts that let database administrators more easily monitor, tune and manage space within DB2 databases, said officials at Houston-based BMC. BMC’s SmartDBA tool watches DB2 systems. Also included is SQL-BackTrack for DB2 UDB 3, which allows DB2 users to perform database backup and recovery through the SmartDBA Web console. The console also allows users to manage Oracle Corp. and Microsoft Corp. SQL equipment and is intended to help reduce the repair times when outages occur. Competitive offerings from AlterPoint Inc. rely on polling devices to determine whether a configuration change has been made. But with polling intervals as long as an hour, detection can take time and cost money, according to Raghav Kher, president and CEO of Rendition, in Redmond, Wash. The instability of networks in a time of tight IT budgets is focusing attention on ways to reduce operational costs. Automation is a key mechanism to help reduce those costs, said Peter Christy, an analyst at NetsEdge Research Group, in Los Altos, Calif. “The network as a whole is an unreliable system. Now what’s important is that networks become better and cheaper to operate, and automation is a key element to making that happen,” Christy said. TrueControl serves as a repository of log information that includes comments from network engineers about why they made certain changes. When a change results in an outage, TrueControl can be used to return the network to an earlier, stable configu- Server databases from one common spot. SmartDBA Performance Management for UDB 2.5 is slated to be available next month. SQL-BackTrack for DB2 3 is due in July with support for DB2 UDB Versions 7.2 and 8.1. Meanwhile, Quest Central for DB2 3 also supports heterogeneous environments. A new compare-and-synchronize feature allows DBAs to compare databases and identify differences to ensure that all changes are in place before deploying applications into production. The product also features DB2 alerts and diagnosis at a summarized database level as well as at the level of detailed partition. Fast Communication Manager in Quest Central for DB2 3 allows DBAs to quickly identify hot spots in multipartition databases. This lets them identify performance problems at the summary level and drill down into the partition to get enough detail to solve a given problem, according to Quest officials, in Irvine, Calif. Quest Central for DB2 3 supports DB2 7.1, DB2 7.2 and DB2 UDB Enterprise Server Edition 8.1. Pricing starts at $1,500 for the Developer Edition and $10,000 for the Professional Edition. ´ ration, Kher said. TrueControl Version 2.0 adds the ability to integrate with Hewlett-Packard Co.’s OpenView Network Node Manager. TrueControl can be launched from within an OpenView console. Rendition is also planning to integrate with tools from NetIQ Corp., BMC Software Inc.’s Remedy Action Request System and Computer Associates International Inc.’s Unicenter. Version 2.0 includes a software development kit for adding new drivers that allow users to attach other networking equipment not currently supported. The release is available now; prices start at $29,990 for 75 managed nodes. ´
NEWS&ANALYSIS Face to Face: Clark Masters Sun aims high VP SEES LOTS OF VIGOR LEFT IN HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMPUTING In recent months, sun Microsystems Inc. has made a big push into lowend, low-cost computing. The Santa Clara, Calif., company rolled out blade servers as part of its N1 data center virtualization strategy, as well as two low-end x86 servers, and promised to continue providing more of the same. But high-end Unix systems are still an important part of Sun’s overall strategy, and Clark Masters, executive vice president and general manager of the company’s Enterprise Systems Products group, spoke with eWeek Senior Editor Jeffrey Burt about Sun’s plans for its top-of-the line servers. Low-end servers and blade servers have gotten a lot of publicity. What is Sun doing with high-end servers? I think the high end matters more today than ever, really. At the $500,000-andup price point—these are [International Data Corp.] data, not Sun data—in the year 2000, it was 20-someodd cents out of every server dollar was spent on the halfmillion- dollar-and-up market range. At the end of 2002, that was over 30 cents, so that the amount of IT dollars going toward the high end ... is larger today than ever before. Is this because the systems are more expensive or because there’s 24 eWEEK n MAY 26, 2003 Masters: High-end spending climbing. a growing demand for them? It’s two things. The weakness in the market we see is more the midrange. So we’re seeing [high-end server growth] with server consolidation and data center consolidation and the drive toward efficiency. Also, we’re seeing strength in government spending, high-performance technical computing [HPTC], all of those things. What’s driving the demand for the really high end? Two or three key factors that I see. One is server consolidation. Two years ago, when I talked with customers, it was all about staying out in front of the wave. ... It was the dotcom boom times. It was all about deployment. Now, today, it’s all about doing more with less—total cost of ownership. How do I drive costs out of the system? Another thing is, most large organizations are structured in business units, and a lot of business units have their own IT infrastructure, and now I think the political walls are broken down, that cost control is much more important than the autonomy of a particular business unit. You see people, to save costs, much more willing to consolidate workloads and combine computing environments, and that helps drive the high-end server business and data-center-class machines. Regarding N1, can you provide me with an idea of how Sun’s largest servers—the 12K and the 15K—fit in with that strategy? With N1, the better we can do at driving up the utilization and efficiency, the more applications we can dynamically provision. That’s a huge opportunity for us. So with the software tools we’re developing with N1, to manage and provision it, plus the virtualization in the hardware with domain and the Solaris operating environment, with resource management and software partitions—or containers—we have very powerful technologies to leverage, to simply be the best in the world at that. How important is HPTC to Sun’s high-end computing strategy? It’s very important to Sun up and down the product line. ... We’re developing visualization technology like Java 3-D, for example. That’s big in the research and technical computing area. We’re finding that technical [computing] has much more growth potential and is becoming much more integrated with most every organization, whether it be manufacturing to do design optimization before you actually do implementations to biotech companies. What are some of the other areas in HPTC that Sun needs to address? We’re very good at large physical memory, so that gives us an advantage. High-bandwidth I/O we have. We have a storage business and very good technology there. When we get our Ultra- SPARC 4 machines—and I think in the worldwide analyst conference I said we would be introducing those before the next analyst conference, so about year-end or early part of next calendar year—that will have multiple threads ... so it will double the floating-point performance that we have in the same footprint. ‘Today, it’s all about doing more with less—total cost of ownership.’ Long term, we’re investing in additional cluster technologies; investing in InfiniBand for high-speed networking, for both I/O and machines to machines; and also new processor technologies and interconnect technologies aimed at HPTC. ´
Page 1 and 2: VOLUME 20, NUMBER 21 n $6 NEWSPAPER
Page 3 and 4: MAY 26, 2003 CONTENTS NEWS&ANALYSIS
Page 5 and 6: NEWS&ANALYSIS LATE NEWS Microsoft t
Page 7 and 8: NEWS&ANALYSIS FRONT OFFICE Oracle e
Page 9 and 10: NEWS&ANALYSIS Network analysis: Fas
Page 11: NEWS&ANALYSIS SERVERS StarView remo
Page 15 and 16: Security: Government DHS revamp on
Page 17 and 18: Software links backup, SRM CA, VERI
Page 19 and 20: Storage: OS upgrade Bigger, better
Page 21 and 22: NEWS&ANALYSIS SPARC workstation is

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