Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> Big management software gets poor grades in Gartner survey
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | Management software heavyweights BMC, CA, HP and IBM are barely
> | making the grade with their customers, earning C and D averages
> | and driving IT buyers to look elsewhere for their operations
> | management needs, according to a recent Gartner poll.
> `----
>
>
http://www.techworld.com/networking/features/index.cfm?featureid=3356&pagtype=all
>
This is tricky. Because from the first point of view, great hardware and
support I put HP at the top of the list. In both areas they knock the socks
off anything else I have ever used.
The management software, is ok, it does the job. It does not blind you with
flash but then how often do you actually use this sort of stuff. In many
cases I suspect that it would be once, when you first set things up, from
then on it is likely that only the SCSI/raid screens will be re-entered
occasionally. I can't think of a way that could be simplified further, add
a drive to a raid - job done. But even with that you tend to register a
ring of drives even if you don't leave them present in the system, so that
you can just hotplug them when you do need them.
My beef with HP on that score is that they always do that thing of giving
you 5 seconds to read the startup screen and decide which of the 5 menu
items the thing that you are after is likely to come under. I think there
should be a minute with a bypass and a pause key if you happen to be
present when it reboots, it isn't as if you have to reboot so often that
the minutes will eat into the rest of your life.
I have to say that I really can't think of any short comings of HP
management software. Much of the extras on the DVDs are for Windows
servers, maybe those on the survey were talking about that, I haven't tried
any of that so I wouldn't know. But for Linux I can't point at any part and
say that HP could do it better, they could do it differently, could put in
a few faffy menus, but in the heat of battle you want software that gets
straight to the point and lets you get the server back up as quickly as
possible.
So you might have a bad Friday and need to switch the server on and jump
directly to say the PXE, set a new address for boot source then set it off.
That is exactly how it works, would anyone really want multiple menus,
coloured screens, pages of explanations at times like that? No, what you
want at those times is a bare minimum that gets you straight to the place
where you need to be.
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