Systems Management: A Back-To-Back Measurement By Bruce Boardman and Matt Brand   Workgroup management is not enterprise management, but it is becoming an increasingly vital part of the enterprise. As small businesses and departmental workgroups mature and become more diverse, so too does their need to manage systems. At Network Computing's lab at Syracuse University, we tested six workgroup-based systems management products from Intel Corp., McAfee, Microsoft Corp., Novell, Seagate Software and Symantec Corp. to see what they offer. Although these products talk about heter ogeneous management, they have a scope limited to PC platforms--leaving MVS, OS/400 and Unix to the likes of Tivoli Systems and Computer Associates. As a group, however, workgroup management systems have grown t o maintain a more distributed environment, supporting console/server hierarchies and bandwidth reservation for the distribution of software over slow WAN links. To view the Report card. We looked at inventory and systems management functionality, but found the biggest gains were made in the area of software distribution. There is no doubt that inventory and systems management are important, but installing and maintaining software consumes the most time in the management of a PC network environment. When the testing dust had settled, we gave top honors to Microsoft's Systems Management Server (SMS). It not only manages all flavors of Windows, but also is easy to use and does an excellent job of software distribution and inventory management. Microsoft has worked through the issues of desktop support and now has a product that provides the biggest bang for the buck. Microsoft Corp. System Management Server 1.2 Microsoft is beating the drum of systems management and the rhythm is "make it better, make it better." It's a catchy beat, and we found ourselves tapping our toes--even with a beta installer thrown in on the offbeat. SMS was rock solid, but it lacks the support for heterogeneous environments, as found in Symantec's Norton Administrator. For managing Windows desktops, this Redmond two-step is hard to top. The product does hit a few bad notes, however, because it lacks the ability to manage real heterogeneous environments. Microsoft seems to think that managing three flavors of Windows and three versions of Windo ws NT means managing the enterprise. Although this might be disappointing to shops that have Unix, OS/400 or even Novell NetWare, Windows desktop management represents the majority of systems management work for most network managers. We were disappointed, but not surprised, by the bindery-only support for NetWare. Microsoft gave us a look at a beta version of its software-distribution installation application. The application is delta-based, meaning it gathers a before and after installation snapshot of a reference PC. The software can determine the change (or delta) between the before and after snapshots. We found SMS let us easily edit the resultant snapshot environment, and we were able to edit INI files, CONFIG.SYS and Windows registry changes. We were also able to substitute actual values for Window environmental variables, such as the Windows system path. Another excellent feature in SMS is the ability to choose to package only those changes that a software upgrade requires. In other words, SMS lets you send only those files needed to upgrade an existing installation. This not only reduces the amount of bandwidth demanded--a recurring theme within SMS--but also provides for some authentication of the target desktop by requiring it to have a previous copy of the software installed. The Wizard-driven package creation feature offers many logical packing options. It prompted us whether we wanted the changed files moved to a file server, zipped, moved from CD-ROM to diskette and which languages we desired for installation. To download an Adobe Acrobat .pdf format version of the Systems Management Tools features chart, click here.

Updated June 6, 1997