| Raj,
Two answers...
First, MSU is being upgraded specifically to handle FDDI.
Should be released very soon.
Second, all the SNMP "stuff" people want will be in V1.2. We
expect to be EFTing this late July, early August - shipping
before the end of the year.
JCE
|
| No one answered your question....
Yes, lots of ***new*** products will have SNMP agents. But what about those
older things, like SNA network gear, and what happens when the customer
graduates from simple network management to remote system's management. Where
is a company building an SNMP agent to start a disk back-up, and if they
built it, would the customer buy it? And while we're at it, what can that
SNMP agent do? Lots of those boxes with SNMP agents still require some
other tool/protocol/mechanism to "configure" or "set-up" the box. Those
tools/whatever are often proprietary. Take a CISCO router, I understand
you have to TELNET to the router and log-in to change anything in
the configuration. Hopefully, they'll be an AM to do that for you.
Note this is not an argument against SNMP - it holds true for
any *standard* management protocol. It will be "awhile" before you see
boxes that can be completely managed via standard protocols, until that
happens, the ability to "plug-in" an AM for any protocol is a major
advantage DECmcc has over the competition. Reasonable customers do
understand this problem. They've got lots of old gear to manage, and in
this age of multi-vendor networks, it's nearly impossible for them
to force all equipment and software they buy to follow one standard.
"That's the nice thing about standards, there's so many of them...."
Still, sooner or later, the need for new AMs will dry up as standards
do take hold, and standard AMs exist and are given away for free with
the basic DECmcc kit or are given away for free by the entity
supplier. We'll always need AMs for legacy devices, but that's a
shrinking market. That's why the future lies in FMs or applications.
And not just any applications, but applications that understand particular
kinds of entities and can provided added value to the manager for those
entities.
Mark
|
| How would an AM work to set up the cisco box with TELNET? Isn't this
like the famous ASCII AM, but with a TELNET protocol twist? Will we be
seeing CTERM and VTP AM modules as well?
One major movement in the netmgt market is the building of vertical
applications to manage specific types of devices. Now that 'everyone'
is going to SNMP, applciations that manage routers, bridges,
concentrators, lan probes, file servers, etc can be built. You see
companies like synoptics and cabletron doing concentrator applications,
cisco and wellfleet making applications that are useful on routers, and
such. With standard MIB's coming for these and other technologies,
these vertical applications will start working on multiple vendor's
devices. Most of the growth in this market is now on the SUN
Netmanager, since it's where 85% of the OEM business has been for the
past 5 years.
SNMP seems far from running out of steam. While CMIP seems to be
better for applications like system management, SNMP will give it a
good 'go for it', and possibly will even handle many of the features
that customers really need in the short term.
Bottom line is that all work that MCC does in the SNMP area brings it
closer to where the market movement is - and once in that market, the
extras that MCC brings takes customers beyond what their 'simple
managers' can provide. However - without parity in the vertical
application area - nobody will ever be using the 'extra stuff'.
bill
|