By Doc Searls
I remember this MIS director back in 1985, moaning to me about the problem of dealing with all these PCs that suddenly showed up in his company. For years computing was about mainframes and minicomputers, but no longer. "I'm used to wrestling alligators," he said. "Now I'm being nibbled to death by lizards." Later he made millions selling his company to Novell, where he worked as a top executive for another few years.
Every few years enterprise computing is faced with no choice at all about coping with invading technologies for which there is enormous unmanaged demand. It happened with PCs in the 80s, then with the Internet in the 90s. Now it's happening with Linux. A year ago Linux was coming into enterprises "over the transom." Now it's standard and strategic. If you have a big enterprise, your choice is to embrace Linux or fight the its adoption by your own engineers.
So let's say your enterprise is full of Linux, which is all the familiar benefits. How do you manage it? I'm not talking command & control here. I'm talking about implementing a fundamental network service that monitors conditions and makes changes over many systems at once: installing and removing RPMs and applications, profiling hardware and software, setting conditions for various events, like installing software.
Network and system management is old hat for companies like IBM's Tivoli, Computer Associates and HP. But we haven't seen anything like it coming out of the Linux world, perhaps because the phrase "Linux management" almost seemed contradictory. Bow along comes Volution, from Caldera.
Craig Burton, who introduced the concept of networks as discrete and interoperable services when he was at Novell and later at The Burton Group, says Volution "provides a significant leap forward for the Linux community and does it with what I consider great foundational management architecture: the kind of infrastructure I would recommend and design. It's good for customers, partners, developers and anybody else that wants what it offers."
While Volution is not yet in the same league as Tivoli and other bigtime competitors, it's serious stuff — a large, complex, comprehensive enterprise-grade product that not only provides a long roster of management features, but manages systems using any Linux distribution. Caldera also intends to support SCO's UnixWare, which Caldera acquired last year.
Enabled by an LDAP v3 directory, Volution can manage multiple LDAP directories using a management console that consists of a browser. Caldera has developed OpenSLP (Service Location Protocol), a tracking framework that allows networking applications to discover the existence, location, and configuration of networked services (mail, security, directory, file, print) in enterprise networks — and contributed it to the open source community. (See www.openslp.org) With OpenSLP, services make their presence known to Volution's management agent without needing to go through any kind of setup, configuration or other modification.
Volution is built around other open Linux and internet standards, including RPM, HTTP, XML, SMTP, TCP/IP and LDAP. This is one reason why Volution's management console is an ordinary Web browser, and a single client can manage any number of servers with LDAP V3 directories. It can change and configure any version of Linux that supports RPM. It can manage users and groups, add and deleting software packages, manipulate file systems, and monitor disk quotas. It can control server programs such as FTP, Apache, DHCP, PPP, DNS, and Sendmail. It can administer network cards, disk partitions and printers, as well as itself. It can also monitor system health (for example with an SNMP trap based on CPU usage). It can detect the hardware and software configuration of every Linux-based machine in an enterprise, local or remote. It can also detect individual machines, or all systems of a particular class. The list goes on.
Volution's benefits go up not only with increasing numbers of systems in an enterprise, but with increasing rates of change in software, device drivers, operating systems, and people. Caldera says Volution overlaps with what IDC calls the Distributed Change, Configuration Management and Directory Enabled Management markets, all three of which are multi-billion dollar segments, all with rapid growth rates.
Craig Burton thinks Volution might even put Caldera into a leadership position in the whole management category. "This is a bold move. It's preposterous to think that a Linux distribution vendor can have an industry impact on network management, but I think that's exactly what Caldera has laid out here. This architecture is strong enough, and well-thought-out enough, that it really is an industry-leading move. It's what network management is going to be like. Whoever solves the problem of management is going to take this kind of approach, whether it's Linux or not. It's a very cool move on Caldera's part."
The one negative, Burton adds, is Volution's object model, which is home-grown. "There is political resistance in the Linux community to using CIM, the Common Information Model of the Desktop Management Task Force (DMTF, at www.dmtf.org), because Microsoft supports it completely; but CIM would be the best choice. Meanwhile, Caldera has made a practical choice that it can transition beyond at a later time."
Perhaps the most telling perspective comes from another vendor in the same space. Ted Shelton, Senior Vice President, Business Development of Borland says, "The thing which is interesting to me about Volution is that it fulfills part of the 'required' list for getting Linux to be enterprise-ready. Another part of Caldera's strategy, trying to put a Linux face on Unixware, is an attempt to do another part of this. Having an appplication server and other standard infrastructure products is the rest of the solution."
Volution Server is priced at $2995 for a 10 pack, or $300 per user for the first ten users. Price per user goes down with larger purchases.