Subsets of Enterprise Management

Enterprise management is typically broken up into three areas of responsibility: server or data center management, network management, and desktop management.

Server or Data Center Management

Data center management encompasses the group of administrators who are responsible for managing BackOffice servers and their applications. Availability and disaster recovery are of the utmost importance for the data center, as is security. Data center management is focused on groups of users and how to provide them with the highest available service.

Windows 2000 Domain Controllers (DCs), application servers, and file and print servers are among the computers housed in the data center. Several tools are available to manage each of these servers; some are included with Windows 2000 and others are available from independent software vendors (ISV). The management of the Windows 2000 Server falls within the realm of the Data Center Manager.

Network Management

Spreading from the data center, like a spider's web, is the network. The issues surrounding network management are different from those surrounding the data center; however, many of the themes remain the same. Security, performance, and availability are among the categories of network functionality that must be managed.

Windows 2000 and Active Directory also provide tools and hooks into network management. Network Monitor (NetMon), for example, can be used to monitor and analyze the network traffic between two computers. Quality of Service (QoS) is another functionality provided by Windows 2000 that works with the network in prioritizing network traffic based on the parameters defined by the Network Administrator. These parameters can be defined based on how an organization prioritizes its network traffic. QoS can also be used in conjunction with Active Directory to provide different users with different levels of service. For example, voice traffic usually has the highest priority across a network. Untimely voice packets can greatly affect the quality of voice service; therefore, they must be on time and are given the highest priority. Message traffic can have a low priority because message traffic, relatively speaking, is not greatly affected by slow traffic or dropped and retransmitted packets. Therefore, different applications can be given different priorities across the network, just as users can. Based on Active Directory's interaction with QoS, users can be granted priority or even access based on who they are in Active Directory. Take, for example, an online brokerage. The online brokerage might want to grant their customers (users) who have portfolios over $100,000 higher priority than those customers with portfolios under $10,000. Defining QoS does have its price. After an application, or group of users, has priority on the network, it is at the cost of available bandwidth for other applications. So, before implementing QoS, make sure you understand the impact it has on your network.

Desktop Management

Desktop management, the focus of this chapter, must centralize the control of anywhere from 10 to 100,000 desktop computers—each of which can vary, from Apple Macintosh to Sun Sparc Stations, with all the flavors of Intel in between. Next, the desktop managers must contend with software, operating systems, and user education. It is easy to see how desktop management could be both expensive and inefficient.

Areas of Management

Data center, network, and desktop management must all contend with similar areas of system management.

The division of each of the pieces seen in the Figure 12.1 pie varies based on the organization, its priorities, the personalities and experience of management, and what they think is important. For example, change and configuration management is a crucial management component for how desktops are installed, configured, and maintained. How a computer performs with its configured software, whether it is an Engineer's CAD workstation or a receptionist's word-processing workstation, is a function of performance management. How users move and manage data and applications, based on permissions, and the areas of the network that they have access to are functions of security management.

This is just a taste of the overall system management pie. There are several texts on management information systems, which outline in more detail the concepts described here.