A Bridge for Disparate Systems

Unix resellers are pleading for more end-to-end debugging, capacity, and management tools to han-dle giant conglomerations of disparate systems. "We can debug each of the pieces of a large system individually on the host platforms, but when we glue them together into the larger picture, it's more difficult to do reliability, performance, and stress testing and figure out why and when something fell apart," says Jim Simmons, vice president and director of the American Management Systems performance and testing lab. "When we're constructing a sys tem where each part depends on another part for the completeness of a processing cycle or transactio n, products that allow us to trace and debug systems during development -- things that have to occur correctly against multiple tiers -- are going to be extremely important."

But many Unix-oriented resellers admit that it would be difficult for a commercial developer to maintain such a tool because it would need to keep up with so many different applications, standards, and platforms. In the meantime, resellers rely on platform-specific products, their own judgment and experience, and occasionally a custom program for full-system testing.

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Jim Simmons

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"We can debug individually on the host platforms, but it's more difficult to figure out why something fell apart."