Simplifying Asset Management

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One tool that does a good job of solving these installation, cost, and simplicity issues is OStivity by Somix Technologies (Sanford, Maine). This is a hybrid approach to the market, suited to both small and large systems. It costs less than $5000 and can be used on any number of machines. For a business of 50,000 desktops, this works out to a dime per node. For small businesses or enterprises that want to pilot this tool on a branch office or test it for possible corporate adoption, a 50-license version can be downloaded free with no time expiration from www.somix.com.

OStivity is a desktop and server hardware/software inventory tool that works on Windows, UNIX, Linux, and other platforms. It does not require manual loading on every machine, it is Web based, and it answers asset questions such as what software has been installed companywide, how many copies are out there, how many more licenses should be purchased, and which employees are using this software.

Currently, this tool gathers data such as operating systems in use, operating system revisions and service packs installed, CPU speed, available and total physical memory, available and total virtual memory, available and total page memory, available and total hard drive space for all drive letters and partitions, software inventory (including package name, revision, and publisher information), network information (including Hostname, IP Address, DNS information, Gateway, MAC address, Subnet Mask if DHCP is enabled, and NIC), and Routing Table information (including protocol used, TCP/IP port number, and local and foreign addresses). Users can apply filters to all the above information to locate the information they need.

In addition, OStivity can be used to determine if people have installed software that the company prohibits. Software such as network games, instant messengers, and internet radio streamers, for example, can consume bandwidth. Administrators can locate these packages rapidly. A+++lso, in order to inventory a workstation or server, an executable is run from a log-in script. Systems are inventoried without installing agents or client software and without consuming noticeable overhead. A decent range of report templates is also available (Exhibit 2).

Exhibit 2: OStivity Screenshot

start example

click to expand

end example

While at first glance, this appears to be a simple software/hardware inventory tool, its designers included a lot more. It locates trouble spots, recognizes trends, and helps resolve network issues. A UNIX CRON-like utility allows users to schedule asset management as well as many other tasks, and it works well in conjunction with third-party alarm monitoring packages such as Ipswich's WhatsUp Gold.

OStivity is packaged with a mySQL database but runs on any SQL-based database. A search engine makes finding answers relatively straightforward. To run advanced searches for specific information, users can type in SQL database queries. Users can also, for instance, schedule an event to search the database every morning for any resources that violate preset thresholds and to notify the help desk before a user experiences performance problems — for example, when hard drives are low on disk space or CPUs are below a certain acceptable megahertz level.



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Server Disk Management in a Windows Enviornment
Server Disk Management in a Windows Enviornment
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2003
Pages: 197

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