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Technology Stocks : BORL: Time to BUY! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill Tucker who wrote (7745)	12/1/1997 9:14:00 AM
From: Peter Marquez	Respond to of 10836

There has been some interest and question about Spectre/Appminder on the thread. Some comparisons have been made to Novera. To clarify these points herein you will find an excerpt from James Ferguson's presentation on Spectre and Appminder which can be found on the Borland Home Page and a short summery. SUMMERY Spectre is an Enterprise Application Management Tool. Its focus will be to manage executables of all types across the enterprise. That includes Entera, Unix demon, COM/DCOM, MIDAS and CORBA objects. Its purpose is: --- to define the "state" these executable objects must be in in order for a given distributed application to be considered up and running and --- to optimize the distributed application's performance by creating, establishing and maintaining an optimum configuration and an acceptable configuration range supporting Load Balancing, Fail-Over, and Dependencies. EXCERPT ...a new version of AppMinder(Spectre)... The ideas of servers( and executable objects) having properties that can be configured( and managed at runtime), that can be inherited. . . . Again, a lot of these things were there because they were needed, because it was meant not only to manage Entera servers, but CORBA servers that have nothing to do with Entera or DCOM servers that have nothing to do with Entera. So it needed to have this sort of flexibility. We're looking at collecting performance data from instrumented servers. So Entera does (collect performance data). . . . . . So it may be your CORBA application. It may be a non-Entera (object collecting performance data). And all storing it within the AppMinder product. Grouping of servers. . . . for instance, you may want to have five copies of a particular server up. Or you may want to have three of five servers up. If four of the servers are up, then that whole group can be considered up. . . . if there are only two services up, then you may want to consider that (group) down and you might want operator intervention. By allowing you to group them like this, you can then have notifications based on not when you're dead in the water, but when you're slightly below the level that you've set. Providing dependencies. If one particular set of servers depends on another to come up, you certainly want them to come up in the right order ( and disable themselves if they lose a dependency.) Fail-over. . . .By allowing you to specify fail-over so you can specify on a failure of one particular server, start another completely separate server potentially on a separate host. So allow you to be much more flexible in how you provide the default tolerance in your application. Some of the other things. Java-based Viewer. . . (Completely built in JBuilder!) With Spectre we're providing much more. . .customizability. . .. (A) customizable cockpit, which is essentially a blank palate that you bring up. And you can drag-and-drop controls onto it. So you may drag a graph-based view with groups so that you can drill down into the groups or for performance history, you can have meters to look at performance. AppView, again, provides two-way integration with the OpenViews of the world and the NetViews of the world. But Spectre is also working to pull data from that. So it can pull machine load information from the NetView and display that right next to your environment. So if you want to be, if you want one group using the Spectre interface to look at your application, you can also get NetView, OpenView information and display it alongside. But if you want to be using the OpenView, you can get the application information inside. So by providing that two-way, it provides a really flexible way of allowing your operations people to view the application in a manner that they're familiar with. . . . Again, this is not focused directly at Entera alone, it is also focused at, for instance, a MIDAS solution that's mostly a DCOM-based solution. . . We are also looking to provide the same sort of thing for CORBA, and IIOP-based solutions.