Adding Value on Top of Management Standards

Due to the massive deployment of the internet and intranet-based services there is a need to consolidate management data generated by heterogeneous sources and to provide an end-to-end service & business level view of IT resources. Because of this the need for a standard enterprise management framework is more acute than ever before. There are currently two major internet-based proposals which aim at providing a common management framework: Web-based Enterprise Management (WBEM) and Java Management API (JMAPI). WBEM has been proposed by Microsoft and is supported by other major companies. This architecture is composed of two major parts, an object schema, and a communication protocol. The object schema, called the Common Information Model (CIM), is currently being refined by the DMTF (Desktop Management Task Force). The protocol, called HMMP (Hypermedia Management Protocol) might be submitted to IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). JMAPI has been developed by Sun/Javasoft and is supported by other companies. It extends Java standard libraries with new classes which implement the management framework. The framework includes a managed object model implemented as Java classes, and a communication mechanism called RMI (Remote Method Invocation). It introduces no new notation to express the schema and relies only on a Java-based communication mechanism. At least as far as the managed object schema is concerned it seems that ultimately these two proposals will converge. We believe that potentially these two proposals can provide a scaleable and general purpose framework, which can interoperate with other existing frameworks and provide a common interface to all management applications. These two proposals however do not provide management functionalities but only the basic mechanisms to support them. Our aim is to add management value on top of these frameworks. We believe that our artificial intelligence technology, namely Model Based Reasoning (MBR), could be used to provide management functionalities at different levels. This would include support for all our other activities, currently under investigation in our department, such as automated management, service and business level management and remote management. We are also aiming at influencing the standardisation process, e.g., through our involvement in DMTF and IETF. Fourth Workshop of HP OpenView University Association, April 2-4, 1997 Madrid, Spain