Hughes, one of the world's leading satellite manufacturers, has customers which span the commercial, scientific and military market. Its information systems division manages all of the networks, systems and applications that support the company's daily engineering and operations activities. Hughes has a distributed computing environment that includes Sun OS, Solaris, HP-UX, Convex, Novell, and NT servers and desktop PCs. Selected systems are grouped and managed as NIS domains and DCE cells. Systems management is directly supported by the company's help desk using the Tivoli suite of tools. Hughes had a homogeneous (Sun OS) Tivoli environment that was long overdue for migration to Tivoli's new environment.



Ephibian assisted in migrating their environment to the new Tivoli environment within four months. This effort included migrating all of the customer's customizations to the new environment, re-architecting user and group account management, and extending the deployment to a much larger heterogeneous environment. In addition, this effort coincided with an NIS domain merge that significantly impacted the population scheme used during the migration.

Ephibian engineers architected a complete user and group administration solution for Hughes' new implementation. This effort included supporting users who require accounts across multiple NIS domains and systems. Ephibian customized default and validation policies, dialogs, and actions through Tivoli's AEF toolkit to support the customer's business, functional, and security requirements. The custom actions supported updates of the auto.home map entries, mail aliases entries, and creation of Convex accounts. Concurrently, a population scheme was created and scripted to import all of the existing users and groups into the Tivoli database and correct profiles. Again, this scheme had to factor in the NIS domain merge that would occur at the same time as the Tivoli migration.

All of these tasks were accomplished in Hughes' lab environment. Rigorous user and group account administration tests were performed during the entire customization effort. After the customizations and population scheme were completely scripted and tested, we assisted the customer in deploying the new environment to their production systems. The Hughes help desk experienced minimal impact during the production cutover and almost immediately had a significant increase in ease of use and functionality.

Because of our architecture efforts and customization strategy, the customer is well-positioned for deploying their Tivoli products. They are now aggressively pursuing full deployment of other Tivoli products, in particular Distributed Monitoring and T/EC.

• Upgraded to the latest Tivoli release
  
  
• Complete User and Group administration
  
  
• Prototyping, testing and proof of concept
  
  
• Production Release
  
  
• Eased the burden on the Help Desk
  
  
• Positioned Hughes to extend the capability to
  Distributed Monitoring and Event Correlation