HP Sim vs IBM Director

[Nicholas J Williams]

Hello,

Im currently looking at these two products to try and work out which one has more to offer.

I have been using SIM 5.0 (and 4.2 before that) for some time and like it very much.

Whilst I appreciate they are technically for two different hardware vendors machines, I would interested to know why people would be inclined to go with HP over IBM for there server and management software choices?

I.e Any horror stories about IBM management software etc.

Thanks in advance

Nicholas

[David Claypool]

I'll let others comment on their individual experiences, but I will point out one fundamental difference:

IBM Director has limited support for non-IBM devices, forcing you to purchase a license for an IBM Director agent to run on that hardware. The view the IBM Director agent provides for ProLiant servers (or anyone else's server) is very plain vanilla.

On the other hand, HP SIM expects that you use the native agent from the vendor on non-HP hardware. Using SNMP and WMI, HP SIM can do status polling, collect configuration data and receive events. HP SIM discovers the IBM Director agent and places a link to it on the server's detail page in HP SIM (similar to the Systems Management Homepage link) so you can easily launch into the Director agent's UI to examine details that HP SIM may not be showing.

Further, to the extent that individual utilities on IBM servers allow for command line access, HP SIM's distributed task facility can be used to run those commands and aggregate the output in the HP SIM event system.

[Nicholas J Williams]

Thanks David,

The information I'm trying to gather affects quite a big decision as to what venodr we go for in server purchasing.

I was wondering if you knew of any publicly available case studies etc and comparisons of the management software and hardware, including widening the net to integration with MOM and other 3rd party technologes.

Thanks again
Nicholas

[David Claypool]

Here's one that touches on it: ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/products/servers/management/hpsim/illuminata.pdf