The Management Integration Consortium, which had its charter accepted at its first meeting on May 5, has established three working groups and expects to publish draft specifications of its work by August. The working groups are looking at data integration, event management, and configuration and asset management in the network management arena – work on […]
The Management Integration Consortium, which had its charter accepted at its first meeting on May 5, has established three working groups and expects to publish draft specifications of its work by August. The working groups are looking at data integration, event management, and configuration and asset management in the network management arena – work on systems management is scheduled to follow at a later date. The data integration group has around 34 members, including Hewlett-Packard Co, IBM Corp and Sun Microsystems Inc, which are devising a database meta-schema, or set of rules for displaying data in a way that enables different applications to share and exchange it. The Consortium is currently talking to the Network Management Forum about integrating this common repository with the Forum’s Open Management Edge specification, and hopes to submit it to X/Open Co Ltd via the Forum. It is also talking to the Open Software Foundation about making the repository into a product. Open Management Edge was born out of the Action team for the Integration of Management Systems working group, comprising such members as IBM, Cray Communications Ltd, Network Managers Inc, and Pontis Consulting Inc. It is essentially a high-level application programming interface or edge that can be added to any shrink-wrapped application to enable it to communicate with other Open Management Edge-compliant applications. This means that developers can encapsulate data from a given application and post it, via an object request broker, to the edge of another application – it doesn’t matter what calls are made or received, because the edge simply neutralises them. The Action team for the Integration of Management Systems has developed a lightweight object broker itself, but says any Common Object Request Broker Architecture-compliant request broker would do the job as would the Open Software Foundation’s Distributed Management Environment request broker – its own is not Corba-compliant because, the group says, it doesn’t need that much functionality to do such a simple task. The object request broker was developed primarily by Pontis, and the source code is expected to be publically available in the next few weeks. The Action team hopes to have Open Management Edge approved as part of the Forum’s Omnipoint project, but the specification has yet to be ratified – the Forum is waiting to see what type of response it gets. The group also says that it submitted Open Management Edge to X/Open’s systems management group a couple of weeks ago, but had it turned down. X/Open, meanwhile, declares that it is still considering the specification, and is prevented from taking it up immediately only because of bandwidth issues, especially as the organisation has a busy schedule laid out for the rest of the year. It also believes that the Open Management Edge would need to be augmented with interoperability components to realise its benefits, because it reckons that simple provision of a portability interface is not enough.
