Altiris Serves Up Management Upgrade

Lifecycle management tools vendor Altiris released Server
Management Suite 6.0, software that tracks a server’s management process.

The SMS 6.0 update is a nod to the Lindon, Utah-based company’s relationships with some of
the biggest Linux players in the market, including IBM and Red Hat .
The company also has close ties with big hardware vendors like Dell , HP and Sun Microsystems .

“There are an awful lot of companies who are investing in both Windows and
Linux initiatives, and we see the ability to have a common management for
both of those platforms is a win,” said Dwain Kinghorn, Altiris CTO.

SMS 6.0 includes extended monitoring support for Sun and Red Hat platforms;
tighter integration with Altiris’ recovery software to account for
software patch failures as well as dependency checks and patch
analysis; and customized support for Dell, IBM, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP and IBM server
blades.

The price of the suite starts at $253 per machine and decreases based on the
volume of licenses purchased. Customers with an Altiris upgrade protection plan can download the software
for free at the company’s Web site.

Altiris is looking to make some headway in the IT management sector by
including as many new hardware components to its lifecycle portfolio as
possible. Last week, the company acquired BridgeWater Technologies for an
undisclosed sum of money.

Kinghorn said the company has been a long-time partner with BridgeWater,
offering the company’s Layer 2 (of the OSI Model )
discovery and management capabilities as an OEM add-on to its
own server management offering.

The BridgeWater buy, as well as the improvements to its management suite,
are part of the company’s roadmap, Kinghorn said.

“We see a lot more of our focus in the next year going into a lot more
automation, and the term we use for that is ‘workflow,'” he said. “Today, we
offer all these integrated features. The administrator sets up the features
and uses the product. What we see next year is the administrator
being able to define workflow scenarios, where they can say, ‘this is a
business process I want to go through.'”