Managing applications in heterogeneous environments

Management is crucial for the use of distributed systems in business environments. The main characteristics of these environments are heterogeneity of hardware, operating systems, programming languages and application. The ISO standardisation activity open distributed processing (ODP) is developing standards in such environments. ODP is based on ISO open systems interconnection and includes management as an integral part. A management system helps to reduce complexity in operating an ODP system in the above characterized environments. The ESPRIT project Integrated Systems Architecture (ISA) is developing concepts to support ODP. The authors have implemented a management system on top of ANSAware, called DIMENSION. After defining some terms they present a brief overview of the DIMENSION´s application management part. Based on this implementation experience they investigate design options of operating system and related functionality which supports the implementation of management systems