CA's Unicenter
CA's Unicenter products provide a highly integrated approach to managing the extended enterprise for continuous availability and optimal performance. CA's Unicenter Network and Systems Management offering comprises three main solutions: Unicenter Network and Systems Management 3.0, Unicenter Advanced Network Operations, and Unicenter Performance Management. These solutions provide services such as network and systems management, automated operations, IT resource management, database management, Web infrastructure management, and application management.
CA's most recent Unicenter offering strays from the framework concept the company established with its earlier Unicenter TNG product. The solutions themselves provide a common set of services that let you integrate third-party devices and technology in addition to the separate solutions. You can purchase and deploy today's Unicenter solutions in any order, as you need them, without an underlying framework component.
Like its competitors, CA strives to ensure the delivery of IT services by letting you manage all the resources necessary for delivering those services. To that end, Unicenter infrastructure-management solutions let you use business process views (so that you can monitor each process as a whole instead of its individual components) and drive actions and alerts from a service-level perspective (i.e., send alerts to administrators only when the software can't maintain a minimum level of service). CA also has a new management portal capable of delivering personalized views of the infrastructure. The goal of management from a service-level and business-process perspective is faster resolution of problems and lower IT training costs.
CA does an outstanding job of providing management coverage across the spectrum of enterprise systems and applications. Except for CCM for desktops, you'd be hard-pressed to find a leading platform or application for which CA doesn't have a solution.
HP OpenView
HP OpenView solutions concentrate on being easy to install and use while delivering powerful features and functionality. HP OpenView Operations for Windows (OVOW), the centralized console component, is a platform for centralized management of distributed e-business infrastructures. (A version of the console is also available for UNIX.) Through smart plugins, you can obtain extended management capabilities for platforms such as Exchange and AD.
The console component uses Microsoft Management Console (MMC) functionality; a Web-based GUI is also available. After you install agent software on all systems from which you want to collect application, network, database, or Internet-related metrics, OVOW sends the agent-collected data to the console for processing and management. The agents gather what HP refers to as 30 golden metrics, which are consistent across all managed platforms, and approximately 120 additional metrics for specific platforms.
At the OVOW console, built-in service views and service mapping let you manage from a service-driven perspective. As OVOW receives problem events, it can take automated action on some events and send others to an administrator for action. Although HP OpenView doesn't address change and configuration management directly, HP partners provide application distribution and asset management.
In addition to closely integrating management services with its own server products, HP has a foot in the door with many companies through its HP OpenView Network Node Manager product. And, thanks to the merger with Compaq, HP has a strong internal consulting group that customers can call on for implementation assistance.
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