Network management systems are very large, but are easily decomposed
into many seperate functions (or objects). From this, it is clear
that one can distribute the management systems, and connect these
togerther using CORBA (or other) for inter-process communication.
One can also take advantage of the other facilities in distributed
systems to help scale the management system. For example:
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The use of naming services permits componenets to be location
independent. This leads to the potential for replication of
services, which has consequences for improved availability and
performance.
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Distributed platforms have provide a number of other standard facilities
which are all useful for management functions. For example, concurrency
in servers and clock syncronisation are useful for manageing the
managers. Authentication and privacy are all important for billing
and auditing, as well as preventing denial of service attacks
through the management systems.
By making the access between management components part of a set of
standard objects, we can use inheritence to implement the common
functions across the different management functions - for example
performance, fault and billing management may all need to access
very similar objects in various databases that log counters from
various MIBs (e.g. call durations, packet counts, errors logged and
so forth).
An important datatype which might be stored in a distributed
management system is the <#2325#> map<#2325#>. This is a
description of the topological relationship between a number of
managed entities (for example, a cable plant map, or a routing
table or even a protocol stack or collection of them. Maps can
desribe connections, sets of connections and so on, so we can model
many of the real world systems that exist in networks.
This too will be in some conceptual database. It will be created at
configuration time, and can be by the
distributed management system to discvover where things are and may
implement policies for any management mechanisms through further
configuration.