Jiro[tm] Technology in Action Jiro technology helps simplify critical but time-consuming management tasks, enabling distributed resources to essentially perform self-monitoring and initiate corrective actions as necessary. For example, a health monitoring bean might observe environmental conditions of an array through the array's management facade. When a pre-determined threshold is crossed, the monitoring bean broadcasts an event that is received by other beans in the Jiro technology environment. In the diagram below, the monitoring bean detects a high ambient temperature which could cause disk failure. The emergency backup bean reacts to the event by initiating a utility to backup the array's data to a tape library. The system administrator is notified about this process without having to intervene.

Intelligent Management Technology for Storage Networks

The more sophisticated networks become, the more difficult it is to manage the diverse systems attached to them. Management applications must be tailored to recognize each new device--whether that device is a disk array, server, database, router, or other application. And because there are few industry-standard infrastructures for developers to leverage, creating new management applications or maintaining support for large numbers of devices becomes increasingly time-consuming and challenging.

Jiro[tm] technology makes it possible to deliver intelligent management services for networked devices through a platform- independent, industry-defined development environment. Using the principles of Java[tm] technology, Jiro technology provides an innovative architecture for connecting and managing complex distributed environments such as storage networks. With its network-centric model for development and deployment, Jiro technology brings higher levels of interoperability, adaptability, and manageability to today's enterprise networks.

Dynamic Resource Management

Jiro technology introduces the concept of a standard management domain that includes base management services such as events, logging, lookup, scheduling, security, and transactions. It provides a standard interface for locating and communicating with these services as FederatedBeans[tm] components. In addition, Jiro technology provides a dynamic services model to support the deployment, updating, and recall of complete distributed management applications composed of FederatedBeans components. By handling communication, persistence, security, and other difficult aspects of distributed applications, Jiro technology eases the creation of automated and policy based management applications that solve the problems of configuring, monitoring, diagnosing and troubleshooting network devices, software, systems, and storage in an intelligent and automated fashion.

Simplifying Application Development and Deployment

Application developers can take advantage of Jiro technology to boost the functionality and cross-platform compatibility of their management applications. By using the base management services provided by Jiro technology, developers can spend less time coding for basic functionality and instead focus their efforts on creating value-added services for their applications.

For network managers, Jiro technology opens the network for more streamlined management and more cost-effective operations. The dynamic management services approach lets managers automatically deploy FederatedBeans components, or beans, on the network to where they are needed, without time-consuming and costly manual intervention. Applications enabled with Jiro technology make it easier to solve the problems of configuring, monitoring, diagnosing, and trouble-shooting today's sophisticated networks.

Innovation Direct from the Industry

As a leader of the open systems movement and the source of the Java platform and Jini[tm] technology, Sun Microsystems brought together a group of industry technical experts to create a new architecture for intelligent resource management.

The result of this collaborative effort is the industry-defined Federated Management Architecture (FMA) specification. Jiro technology is a productized implementation of the FMA specification developed and supported by Sun.

Jiro Technology Benefits Developers:

Jiro technology is a platform-independent infrastructure for developing interoperable and automated management solutions.

• Implementation of an industry-defined standard
• Eliminates need to port to multiple APIs and interfaces
• Reduces investment required for infrastructure development
• Simplifies integration with other management solutions
• Enables rapid development of more innovative applications and services

Jiro Technology Benefits System and Network Managers:

Jiro technology is a Java technology-based infrastructure for streamlining the complexity inherent in managing distributed networks.

• Simplifies and automates administration of network resources
• Reduces cost of storage network management
• Accelerates deployment of resources, services, and updates
• Offers flexibility to change network structure as needed
• Makes new resources and functionality instantly and dynamically available

Jiro Software Development Kit and Jiro Runs-on-Kit

Multiple Sun products will soon be available to facilitate the creation and deployment of applications enabled with Jiro technology, including a Jiro Software Development Kit (SDK), Jiro technology runtime environment, publicly available source code, and a Jiro Runs-on-Kit (ROK), enabling developers to test compatibility of FederatedBeans components with the technology.

For More Information

For the latest updates on Jiro technology and FederatedBeans component development, visit the Jiro technology Web site at www.jiro.com.