Effectively managing your network may not seem very sexy, but
having the right tools to save administrator time and company money can make your
network manager the real hero in the long run.
Novell recently introduced its ZENworks line of network tools, which hold the
promise of reducing costs and increasing administrator efficiency, not to mention
your overall network health.
I recently spent some time examining the first release of two of the ZENworks
tools--ZENworks for Networks (ZfN) and ZENworks for Servers (ZfS). Though these
are the initial releases for each of these products, they both hold compelling
value for companies interested in increasing efficiency while reducing costs.
ZfN is a network-management tool that helps you efficiently use your
existing network bandwidth. ZfS provides facilities to consistently manage
multiple NetWare servers both local and remote. Let's look at these two ZENworks
products in more detail.
ZENworks for Networks
Our highway systems and our networks have at least one thing in common:
Traffic on both will expand to meet available space.
Usually, we can't just throw additional bandwidth at the network whenever we
please, since there are provider constraints and budgetary concerns (at least for
most of us).
The wise network manager must find ways to maximize existing resources to
keep end-users happy while preserving technology investments. Properly leveraging
technology investments also enables network managers and business leaders to
effectively plan future technology investments during budgetary cycles.
Network-management tools are certainly not new phenomena, but many in the
past only excelled at managing devices. ZfN differs from the more traditional
network management tools in that it manages network traffic rather than devices.
Managing your network traffic efficiently means establishing policies that
determine who gets what priority and when. Linking policy management with
directory services is an ideal way to effectively manage traffic. ZfN links
nicely with Novell's Directory System (NDS) eDirectory to create a true
policy-based method to manage your bandwidth.
If you manually install and configure ZfN, it can be a tricky proposition,
but Novell has provided a neat option that enables the administrator to easily
create a complete policy infrastructure.
Using this option, ZfN automatically discovers all of the devices on your
network. Post-discovery, the network manager need only define the rules for
managing network traffic. During the rules definition process, you might choose
to give some traffic, such as Domain Name Service (DNS) requests, a higher
priority while giving file transfers a lower level of importance.
I found ZfN setup straightforward, though I feel the user interface reduces
productivity. Novell should borrow a page from those vendors who design
integrated development environments and change its ZfN interface to more of a
tabbed metaphor. This will save administrators time and trouble.
ZENworks for Servers
With the onset of the virtual organization and outsourcing arrangements comes
the need to maintain physically distributed servers. Network administrators need
to maintain consistent configurations across all these distributed servers. But
how can they do this without spending most of their lives on an airplane?
That's the premise behind the first release of Novell's ZfS, a
directory-based tool that is useful for managing distributed NetWare servers. ZfS
is meant to eventually replace Novell's ManageWise product because the former is
tightly linked to Novell's NDS.
Pass on ZfS for the time being if you have a smaller NetWare shop or a
business that's running a mix of server platforms (e.g. NetWare, Solaris, Linux,
Windows). The price of ZfS makes this tool best suited to sites with a large
number of distributed NetWare servers. And ZfS is limited to NetWare only at
present, which limits its usefulness in mixed settings.
ZfS is really cool for consistently managing local and remote NetWare
servers. It can be used to manage start-up and shutdown as well as to apply
support packs. These features are especially useful at sites where you may have
one or more NetWare server, but no administrator available.
ZfS has some issues typical of a first release. For example, ZfS supports the
creation and distribution of software packages to NetWare servers. Yet there are
no tools supplied to help the administrator create the software packages--the
effort is manual and tedious, at best. And, the administrative
interface--ConsoleOne--suffers from poor performance. Novell expects to address
these issues with this first release, including expanding support to other
platforms. The company expects to release an update to ZfS by the time you read
this.
Is ZENworks Worth It?
While both of these Novell tools--ZfN and ZfS--are first-release products, I
think it's worthwhile to test-drive them if your business is invested in Novell
technologies. I would not yet place either tool in a production environment, but
I would keep an eye on where Novell takes its Zen product line.
In general, I like Novell's approach to better managing network bandwidth and
servers. As our computing environments become more and more server-based and more
and more distributed, tools that help us better manage the network resources will
be crucial.
Maggie Biggs is director of the InfoWorld Test Center,
where she evaluates emerging technologies. She has more than 15 years of business
and IT experience.
