Technical Evaluation Server Management Products

Executive Summary

It's 3 a.m. when the insistent beeping of your pager forces you to drag yourself out of bed. The message is as plain as day, the main production file server went down and went down hard. You hurriedly rush to brew a pot of coffee and throw on some clothes. As you race to the office, dread looms over you like the dark billowy clouds overhead. This is bid week at your trading company, and without that server, money will be lost-lots of it, along with the possibility of your reputation and your job.

This situation seems a bit surreal, or does it? Many of us have been faced with an unexpected server outage, and it never occurs at an opportune time. In this paper, we will be evaluating software that is designed to assist the network administrator in circumventing unexpected down time by alerting him to problems before they become serious. Interestingly, in too many IS shops, these applications are never installed or are underutilized, even though they are freely available on the Internet or bundled with the purchased equipment.

The three products evaluated, Compaq Insight Manager, Hewlett-Packard TopTools and the Dell Inspector, each bring to the table features that are primarily designed around hardware management. Each product has features that extend beyond that scope, but the purpose of our testing is to determine which product does the best job at managing and reporting its hardware. Our evaluation was centered on the needs and concerns of the network administrator and focused on three aspects of the software experience: usability, depth of reported data, and interoperability with other third-party network and systems management applications.

Our test environment consisted of a server and desktop-class PC from each vendor: A Compaq 7000/Deskpro 6000, an HP NetServer LH II/Vectra 7000, and a Dell PowerEdge 4200/Optiplex GXa. Each system was installed with Windows NT Server or NT Workstation 4.0, Service Pack 3; Internet Explorer 4.01, Service Pack 1, and Adobe Acrobat Reader. Additional software was only installed in accordance with the software requirements of the application being tested.

A choice was made to conduct the evaluation on as level a playing field as possible. Thus, to make more efficient use of the time we had available and after some debate, we decided to deploy Windows NT over Novell NetWare on our servers. HP's offering, TopTools, required Internet Information Server 4.0 and the Dell offering, HP Network Node Manager SE, required NT as well. Therefore, it made sense to deploy an NT-only solution for our testing.

Unanimously, Compaq Insight Manager was the clear choice. The depth of reported data, combined with interoperability with enterprise management systems and network operating systems, raised the bar for its competitors. Its interoperability was a breath of fresh air compared to the implementation difficulties experienced with the other products. Insight Manager and Compaq products were designed to walk hand-in-hand, which was apparent in the rigorous testing performed on the products. No other product managed its own hardware at such depth and precision as Compaq Insight Manager. The following analysis will explain in detail how our decision was made to choose Compaq Insight Manager as the superior product.