REVIEW
Special

PRODUCT: Centennial Discovery

SUPPLIER: Centennial Limited

TEL: 01488 682444

WEBSITE: www.centennial.co.uk

PRICE: From £6 - £19 per PC

Centennial, a young British company, has built on its experience and success with its Millennium-compliance testing and fixing tool, Centennial 2000, to produce a new inventory management tool, called Centennial Discovery. This new product provides an extensive network inventory tracking solution for corporates. It builds an inventory of PCs, servers, notebooks, routers, switches, and printers. It maintains an 'audit trail' of all changes to these IT assets, including such things as RAM complement, CPU manufacturer and type, BIOS manufacturer and revision level, hard disk  size, and free disk space. Also, software is audited using an easily updatable Software Recognition Database (SRD).

The main strength of the product is the ease with which it may be used by the network manager to carry out inventories on thousands of network workstations, etc. In particular, it is designed to be deployed easily across a network, reporting back to a central database details of IT assets. Centennial offers four ways which may be used in combination with each other, of deploying the client agent:

Firstly, the client agent may be loaded across the network via an amended network login script. This works equally well for Novell and Windows  NT/2000 networks. Next time a user logs in, the client program is downloaded. This even works for users who are only occasionally connected to the network, for example, travellers with notebook PCs. The disadvantages of this approach are that it doesn't work for remote dial-in users, and a user must sit at the client machine and log in to the network, and this may be inconvenient for some servers that you wish to inventory. Secondly, Windows NT/2000 clients can have the client agent 'pushed' to them, but they must be switched on when this happens, of course. The disadvantages with this approach is that new machines are not automatically detected as they are added to the network, and only Windows NT/2000 machines can be supported in this way.

Next, you can email the client agent package to users, who must be relied upon to execute the package. However, this has the advantage of working with dial-in remote users. Finally, you can create a floppy diskette that enables the user to audit the machine and store the inventory on the diskette. This, of course, works even for machines that are not on the network. There is a choice of two ways to communicate between clients and the database/administration machine. You can simply set up a shared folder on a server to which all clients must have access, and this has the advantage of being protocol independent. Or you can use an IP agent that listens for TCP/IP connections from clients. You cannot use both methods simultaneously.

Each IT asset must be identified by a unique name, and there are a couple of ways of doing this: you can ask the user for a machine identifier through a customisable prompt. For example, it can be modified to request the PC's Asset number or any other identifier used by the particular organisation. Under Novell, it can automatically capture the user's login name and use that as the identifier, if you wish, and this might be appropriate where each workstation has one primary user. A number of other parameters can be used, in combination, to produce the unique name, for example, NetWare Context, NT Domain Name, Windows Name for computer, MAC address, etc

One of the most difficult aspects of inventory management at a large site is knowing where each asset is physically. Most inventory management programs rely on the adminstrator to enter this information manually, and cannot know when an item is moved. Centennial Discovery solves this problem by interrogating switching and routing devices to determine to which port each item is attached. With this approach, the location information is, of course, automatically updated when an item is moved. Centennial calls the agent that provides this location information LAN Probe, and this requires at least one 32-bit Windows machine on each network segment, and is dependent on the TCP/IP protocol being used. The administration program must be run on a 32-bit Windows platform, such as Windows 9x, NT or 2000. Centennial Discovery ships with a copy of Microsoft Data Engine (MSDE), or you can use Microsoft SQL Server; these are the basis of the administrator's interaction with the database. The client agent runs additionally under DOS and Windows 3.1.

Verdict
Centennial has provided an IT inventory solution that is easy to install and deploy. It uses the Windows graphical interface to the maximum with drag-and-drop and directory-tree-like structures to represent the relative positions of assets within the organisation. Besides, the obvious application of carrying out inventories on an ongoing basis, this tool can be used to plan a Windows 2000 roll-out by identifying machines that are not W2K compliant.