Castanet 4.0/Marimba Inc.
Push Technology Classic Goes With Industry Flow Updated and repurposed,
Marimba's Castanet emerges as a versatile enterprise administrative tool
Rating:
***1/2 out of four
Price:
Basic installation, $10,000
Platforms:
AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Windows 9x/NT
Marimba was once the darling of the Internet world, with its Castanet push
technology positioned as a revolutionary way to distribute information over the
Internet.
Push technology never came to dominate Internet data distribution as had
been expected. But to its credit, Marimba has shrewdly repositioned Castanet
as an efficient way to distribute data to intranet users and connect to back-end
databases. Castanet 4.0 emerges as a valuable tool for the enterprise, both in
terms of providing data to end users and in giving systems administrators a
powerful way to manage applications and data on the network.
Rather than being a monolithic package, Castanet is actually a cluster of
product suites. If you've looked at Castanet in the past, you know that it
originally consisted of three suites: a production suite that packaged
applications for distribution, a management suite for setting up distribution
policies, and an infrastructure suite containing the actual transceiver and tuner.
These were not integrated programs, but semiautonomous tool groups that
combined forces to achieve a common goal: "pushing" data out to users, as
opposed to setting up a Web site and waiting for users to actively grab the
data.
While the goal of Castanet 4.0 is still to push bits and bytes out to users, the
targeted user is somewhat different, as is, in many cases, the information being
pushed. New in version 4.0 are two new suites--Inventory and
Subscription--that place Castanet squarely in the enterprise space.
Polling and pushing In an enterprise context, distributing applications can be a
time-consuming task, especially in situations where some remote users
connect on a dial-up or intermittent basis. Castanet's Inventory Suite focuses
on application distribution; in doing so, it collects application, network,
hardware, and operating system information from each workstation, working
on a schedule set up by the systems administrator. If a device is not connected
to the network when Castanet performs an inventory search, an agent installed
on the remote device will automatically perform the scan anyway and store the
information, reporting it the next time the device is connected to the network
and the Castanet server. (By contrast, most inventory products require a
persistent connection to a workstation.) The results of this search can be
sorted by any aspect of the workstation (hardware, operating system, storage
thresholds), which makes it easy to see the status of your network devices by
any criteria. One distinguishing feature of the Castanet inventory suite is that it
doesn't scan the hard drive of a targeted workstation before performing an
update or new installation; instead, it reads the system registry and makes
changes based on that information.
As a result, Castanet can publish any application, ranging from
shrink-wrapped applications of any kind (including both desktop and server
applications) to custom applications written in C, C++, Java, or Visual Basic.
In addition, Castanet can be used to distribute incremental changes (like bug
fixes, operating system updates, or new drivers).
The Subscription Suite provides detailed support for pushing specific
information to specific users. Administrators can set up rules based on the
needs of individual users or groups, or by machines. Castanet also supports
multi-stage distribution, where an application can first be distributed to a
limited testing group before release to the full user community. Multiple
application assignment options (available, subscribe, subscribe and start,
primary, delete) enable tasks to be delegated across multiple domains. In
addition, Subscription Suite uses and stores user information from most
centralized sources, including LDAP servers, DNS, Windows NT Domains,
or relational databases.
With these new suites and other new features, Marimba has substantially
improved the management capabilities in Castanet. Top administrators can
delegate management functions to other users, leading to multilevel
management. User information can be imported from NT Domains,
Unix-based NDS, or LDAP.
Administrators can view reports on transmitted traffic, showing the number of
subscribers, the transmitter time, the number of requests, and the size of the
data block sent by the transmitter. Results can be viewed for a selected single
transmitter, or for all transmitters.
To make sure that no single transmitter get overwhelmed by serving the needs
of too many users, Marimba includes a rudimentary load balancing system to
distribute the work more evenly among the transmitters. When working with a
series or cluster of transmitters, channels can be repeated by other transmitters
during high-traffic conditions, and this redirection can be set up on a
round-robin or geographic basis. (Sadly, there's no advanced load balancing
like the kind you find in the application server world, where a specific load
would trigger mandatory load balancing on the network.) Transmitters can be
configured to work on a local server or anywhere else on the network (with
the proper permissions to install executable files).
Remote administration Management can also be performed remotely now,
thanks to Remote Tuner Administration, interfaced through a Web browser
(as opposed to a proprietary application), which means that administration can
be done from anywhere on the Internet or an intranet. For example, tuner
settings can be modified--security settings can be changed, schedules
updated, and proxies altered. Further, Remote Tuner Administration allows
batch operations to be applied across multiple groups of tuners via the
command line. In fact, moving functionality to the Internet--as opposed to
having the Internet and TCP/IP serving merely as a transport mechanism--is
an important aspect of the new Castanet.
We installed Marimba Castanet on a PC running Windows NT 4.0 Server,
subsequently downloading and installing the tuner to a Windows 98 PC
elsewhere on the network. You can specify that a client present a verified
digital certificate before downloading and installing the tuner; this will require
the download of a Certificate Manager from the Marimba Web site. (Castanet
also supports the Secure Sockets Layer as a security device.) And when
installing the Castanet Tuner, you are prompted to always trust certificates
presented by Marimba. Enterprises will probably want to download the
Certificate Manager, since it allows centralized management of user digital
certificates.
Packaging an application for installation on the remote machine was a simple
wizard-based process, leading to a channel for application installation on the
client side. Installing specific portions of Lotus SmartSuite (1-2-3, WordPro,
Organizer) was no problem, and there were no subsequent problems on the
client side. We also packaged a Java applet for remote installation and
encountered no problems.
Push technology has grown tremendously over the past couple of years, while
Castanet and-- more important--its aims and potential market have changed
dramatically as well. With version 4.0, Castanet proves that it can be a
valuable tool on the enterprise level, providing advanced management
capabilities along with tools for effective communications across the
enterprise.
--Kevin Reichard
On deck there's a few notable Internet IPOs:Marimba and eToys. Marimba is the firm that
gained notoriety in 1996 on the media blitz of founder Kim Polese. Its business was associated
with the short-lived "push" phenom before the media got tired of push and shoved it aside.
Those days are long gone as Marimba now calls itself an Internet-based software management
solution company. Its main product is Castanet, software that allows corporations to distribute,
update and manage applications and related data over corporate intranets, extranets and the
Internet.
No matter what the word de jour is, push or not, Marimba generated $17 million revenue in
1998, so they're doing something right. 81.4% came from software licensing and the rest from
services. Significant investors include Kleiner Perkins and Compaq. We think rival BackWeb's
IPO can't be far off if Marimba is on tap. |
