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At the same time as networks have become large and complex, network operators are under greater pressure to reduce operating costs and eliminate network disruptions. Manual misconfiguration of network devices is a leading cause of network downtime. For example, a few years ago, AT&T experienced an outage that affected most of its network and took two hours to rectify. This was caused by a manual misconfiguration of the OSPF routing protocol in one of AT&T’s backbone routers [1]. By necessity, many service providers and enterprises manage their networks with a battery of independent management interfaces rather than taking a unified approach to network configuration. The NETCONF protocol promises to unify the process of configuration management with a single API. Tail-f Systems delivers a family of products to help build network management systems that fully support the NETCONF standard.
This paper reviews the business cost of outages such as the one AT&T experienced. It also details some of the reasons that network architecture has become so complex, discusses current approaches to the problem and finally presents NETCONF as a powerful building block solution to the network management problem.
Business Implications of Network Outages
The network architectures of network providers (such as telecom companies, mobile operators, internet service providers, and enterprise networks) are growing increasingly complex. They are also becoming increasingly critical, such that the cost of poor implementation or outright failure has grown drastically. Network or service outages lead to lost revenue, organizational inactivity, PR nightmares and the alienation of customers and/or employees, any of which can cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour, if not millions, while also creating significant long-term setbacks. Additionally, the loss of control over customers’ and subscribers’ personal data has become an increasingly central issue over the last few years. This liability, as well as the misuse of services -- such as abuse, fraud, worms, viruses, and other malevolent or vulnerable software -- place increased demands on the network architecture. Such network security challenges arise from having complex services that can be abused when misconfigured.
Pressures that Lead to Complex Network Architectures
A range of internal and external pressures contribute to the increasingly complex network architectures present in many service provider and enterprise environments. While satisfying these often disparate demands, the network administration organization must accomplish its tasks quickly, efficiently and inexpensively. For example, if a virus or worm attacks a large service provider this may require the system administration organization to combat the infestation by reconfiguring a network of several thousands of routers with complex policies, as quickly as possible in order to minimize interruption.
Networks typically include a range of elements, each of which is increasingly complex to manage and configure. Required services are also growing more complex, involving ever larger configurations. Also, individual boxes can provide an increasing number of services.
Most network devices are configured to cooperate with other members of the network. The most critical network functions usually require specialized components as well as the basic network building blocks. For example, if a web server is deployed, regardless of its function (for internal use, third-party hosting, web services, or other services), it is normally physically replicated and protected by load balancers to provide resilience and scalability and augmented by firewalls and SSL accelerators to provide security and offload computationally intensive tasks. This increases the network’s complexity as each entity must be individually architected, managed, and upgraded to provide maximum functionality in a changing business environment.
A further cause of complexity is the many ways in which organizations evolve. Examples include organic growth, geographical diversification, and mergers and acquisitions.
As an organization and its network grow, devices are added to increase capacity, reliability, and security. The addition of new offices, points of presence, or data centers results in additional architectural issues which increase the complexity of the organization and the network. For example, company growth and reorganizations may add new sites to the company’s virtual private network which requires complex network reconfiguration by the VPN service provider.
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