Overview

Consultants never know what they are getting into until they arrive at a site and make an assessment. They may have to upgrade a network no one has audited in years or consolidate servers in an enterprise where no one knows how many servers there are or where they all are. Consultants need a tool that tells them what's on the network, how it's configured, the status of patches and services packs, and who has access to which servers-in minutes, not days.

More and more, a consultant's first step in a network assessment is to run Configuration Auditor from Ecora® Software to find out what's "under the hood" and make recommendations quickly and accurately.

Ecora products automate configuration reporting, auditing, change management, and consistency enforcement across the enterprise (supports Windows NT/2000 servers and workstations, Exchange 5.5/2000 servers, Cisco routers and switches, Solaris systems, Oracle databases, Lotus Domino servers, Novell NetWare servers, and soon SQL, & IIS). With a few mouse clicks, solutions for internal security, disaster recovery, audits, compliance documentation, and business continuity plans become easy and cost-effective to implement and maintain. The agent-free software installs in minutes onto a single administrative desktop and generates reports automatically in online, document, spreadsheet, or diagram format to provide a comprehensive view of how the enterprise is configured.

The Situation

Unisys is a worldwide IT services and solutions company whose 37,000 employees help clients in more than 100 countries fully utilize technology for business advantage. The Enterprise Network Services (ENS) consulting organization specializes in infrastructure transformation, with Centers of Excellence dedicated to Microsoft, Security, and Networking solutions. Focused on improving efficiency and maximizing client satisfaction, ENS is always in search of tools that are easy to implement and use, have a short learning curve, allow consultants to save time, and provide maximum value to clients.

A Recent Unisys Project

Elias VarVarezis, a Unisys Systems Architect who designs and implements best practices for enterprise-wide Microsoft Windows and Exchange environments, was called in to assess and reconfigure a client's data center network for manageability and availability. The data center had grown rapidly from 3,000 to 40,000 users (soon to be 60,000) and had inconsistent performance standards as well as inadequate backup and configuration documentation. The first step was to assess the current state of the client's data center. The lack of documentation necessitated a complete IT audit. "We had neither the time nor the staff to go out and manually document each server on the network," VarVarezis says. "Without some type of automation, the best you can do is document a small number of servers and make assumptions about the rest." VarVarezis wanted to sort 142 servers into categories for configuration, but auditing even one was a monumental task.

The Solution

"Without Ecora, our startup would have been far more difficult," VarVarezis says. Using Configuration Auditor for Windows and Exchange, Unisys was able to gather the necessary configuration data quickly via native methods including: remote registry calls, read only API calls, and WMI. The consultant could baseline the results, set a performance "gold standard," and run set reports to enforce compliance. "With Ecora, we were able to audit the network, document the environment, categorize the servers, and build configuration management databases, in a way we could never have accomplished manually." With an automated solution, VarVarezis was able to create installation and configuration documentation to ensure business continuity in the event of a disaster.

By using Ecora's solutions, a team member can quickly restore a server's settings to the exact pre-disaster state and discern the order in which to bring servers up correctly.

Benefits:

Speed: With Configuration Auditor, Unisys was able to reduce the time needed to run an enterprise-wide configuration report from six to eight hours down to eight minutes! Unisys saved approximately 80 hours of manual work during the assessment and 200 hours during the change reporting phases by automating with Configuration Auditor.

Powerful discovery tool: Unisys was able to inventory the network and bid the work effort that was required accurately. They also immediately identified network trouble spots, such as servers not running the appropriate service packs, incorrect virus protection, or inconsistent configuration settings.

Change Management: VarVarezis subcategorized the servers into functional groups, ran weekly change reports to track network changes, and matched those to the Change Management log to make certain standards were applied. VarVarezis commented, "When we ran Ecora, we knew where we were, where we had to get to, and we knew when we got there - all using Configuration Auditor."

Baseline Reporting: Configuration Auditor 2.x includes baseline reporting, which enables users to hold a corporate standard up to many servers of the same genre and ensure compliance. This job can be run on its own or on a set schedule.

Other features of Configuration Auditor 2.x include:

Baseline Reporting: Enables consultants to designate any device, server, workstation, or collection of settings as the "gold standard" and, with a couple mouse clicks, compare other configurations against it to check compliance with corporate or federally mandated configuration requirements.

Change Tracking: Identifies any changes in servers, workstations, or devices throughout the environment. Change reports are indispensable when it comes to security maintenance and problem resolution because they not only flag changes, but show "before and after" settings without requiring additional research.

Full Scheduling Capability: Allows administrators to save countless hours by automatically scheduling recurring security reports, data collection, change, or baseline comparison reports.

Summary Reports: Show key configuration settings, like security patches, across many servers and devices, making it easy to spot problem areas.

Built-in Reports: The hundreds of project-specific reports can be customized for any IT projects.

The Future

Ecora launched Configuration Auditor 2.0 in February 2002 and before the year is out, the company will release an array of new products and services. First, Ecora will release Enterprise Configuration Auditor, a single application that will manage auditing, security, and change management for all the major enterprise products from Cisco, Lotus, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, and Solaris. From one user interface, IT staff can monitor and manage all platforms, operating systems, servers, and workstations. Secondly, Ecora is expanding its support of Microsoft platforms, including IIS, SQL Server, and Terminal Server. Third, Ecora is going to introduce new solutions for enterprise security and patch management.