METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR MANAGING DATA IMAGING IN A DISTRIBUTED COMPUTER SYSTEM

A three-tiered data imaging system is used on a distributed computer system comprising hosts connected by a network. The lowest tier comprises management facade software running on each machine that converts a platform-dependent interface written with low-level kernel routines that actually implement the data imaging system to platform-independent method calls. The middle tier is a set of federated Java beans that communicate with each other, with the management facades and with the upper tier of the system. The upper tier of the inventive system comprises presentation programs that can be directly manipulated by management personnel to view and control the system. In one embodiment, the federated Java beans can run on any machine in the system and communicate, via the network. A data imaging management facade runs on selected hosts and at least one data imaging bean also runs on those hosts. The data imaging bean communicates directly with a management GUI or CLI and is controlled by user commands generated by the GUI or CLI. Therefore, a manager can configure the entire data imaging system from a single location.