Is Web ready to manage?

Unless users have been living under a stone for the past three years, they've heard that the World Wide Web and Internet technologies are the future of network management.

The Web provides a familiar, platform-independent environment from which to manage. A browser lets a network manager access management data from anywhere, as long as he or she has a laptop computer.

And Internet technologies such as Java provide the management application integration "glue" that platforms have promised for years but have yet to deliver.

All this considered, it's hard to argue against the Web as the platform from which to manage the enterprise. But is the Web ready to take on enterprise management?

Sure, the Web browser can provide a friendly user interface for management reports and device configuration. But these are two routines that have little to do with responding to critical alarms in real time or launching scripts to automate responses to alerts.

In short, the jury is still out on whether Web technologies can fill the bill for mission-critical management of the enterprise.

"How do I look at my Cisco routers and Bay switches at the same time?" asks John McConnell, president of McConnell Consulting Inc., in Boulder, Colorado. "There's a lot of promise there, but the reality [of Web-based management] is still a bit short."

Don't tell that to companies developing Web-based tools, of which there are too many to mention. But of the established players, Cisco Systems Inc. is arguably the most bullish proponent of Web-based management. Among the startups there is NextPoint Networks Inc., which just began shipping its Web-based service level manager.

Cisco is one of the founders of the Web-based Enterprise Management (WBEM) initiative, a group of vendors seeking to establish Web-based technologies as the underpinning of integrated enterprise management. The group, which also includes Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp., BMC Software Inc. and Compaq Computer Corp., argues that Internet technologies should be the standard by which management applications run across different platforms and share information.

But WBEM vendors, including Cisco, have acknowledged that the release of WBEM technologies is tightly coupled with Microsoft's release of Windows NT 5.0. Windows NT 5.0 is slated to ship late this year or early next.

Last week, however, Cisco intimated that it may not wait for Microsoft before shipping WBEM-type tools. "Certainly, the system management vendors are all geared up waiting for the NT 5.0 implementation of [WBEM] to come out," says Jim Turner, manager of network management partnerships at Cisco. "But in other areas, by no means is Microsoft a necessary component."

Cisco last year announced a product called Cisco Resource Manager, a suite of Web-based applications for inventory, software and availability management of Cisco devices. And last fourth quarter, Cisco announced a statement of direction for "management intranets and extranets." Web and Internet technologies can be used to tie network management information to other information bases, such as directories; to make that data widely accessible; and to automate device management.

But still, Cisco does not see Web or Internet technologies replacing enterprise management platforms -- merely enhancing them.

"A lot of the services that the network management platforms provide are essential services regardless of how you integrate the rest of the elements of the network," Turner says. "All of the original values that the network management frameworks offer are still required and need to be [deployed] in an integrated fashion."

The Web augments platform services by fostering better application scale and interoperability, and by allowing users to customize their consoles regardless of the operating systems on which they run, Turner says. "All of those things complement the original promise of the network management platforms; they don't obsolete it," he says.

NextPoint is a little more aggressive when it comes to the Web/management platform relationship.

"What we have bought into is the Web becomes the platform," says Bill Maro, president of NextPoint. "The Web becomes the way of integrating all of the information and the tools and the access that folks need."

NextPoint this month is shipping NextPoint S3, a Web-based network management system designed to provide network administrators and end users with the information they need to monitor the status of key business applications.

NextPoint S3 consists of Windows NT server software, distributed NT and Solaris agents, and a Java-based user interface. The agents collect network and application response-time metrics, while the server, written in C++, provides an engine for real-time and historical analysis, as well as alarm and event handling. The Java interface features push technology for automated information distribution and access, and channel buttons for further detail.

But Internet technologies are not a management panacea, Maro acknowledges. Indeed, Next-Point wrote the S3 servers in C++ because of some performance limitations in Java. "We believed C++ was going to give us the best performance on a server," Maro says. "What we liked about Java was the browser, the platform independence and the real-time aspects of it. We decided we could get the best of both worlds by mixing Java and C++."

Maro expects Java to eventually attain server-level performance, but NextPoint is not likely to rewrite its servers. "Because [C++] is operating so well, we haven't even thought about changing the server to Java," he says.

Users agree with Maro's assessment of Java and generally note that Web technologies are limited in enterprise management scope. David Caplan, senior member of the technical staff at GTE Internetworking's technical solutions and deployment department in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is beta-testing NextPoint S3.

"Today, Web-based management is the client side of some management system," Caplan says, though he notes that the portability of a Web interface is "very desirable."

Like Cisco, Caplan believes Internet technologies can enhance enterprise management systems, but not replace them entirely. Java clients, for example, can perform a lot of the data processing on behalf of centralized management servers.

"The management system could just be the repository of raw information, and the applet manipulates that information," Caplan says.

For configuration, individual network devices can have unique URLs that allow users to access network management information specific to that device.

"[Management is] infinitely scalable because your management system is now a loose confederation of all of the devices in your net," Caplan says. "You just have to create a homepage with all of those URLs on it and you're done."

But this still does not address enterprise-level tasks, such as changing a polling policy or a password or a community name, Caplan says.

"It's only a little bit better than telnet," Caplan says, referring to the tedious task of changing each device individually. "That's why I think there will always be the need for a some type of hierarchical enterprise system."