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Introduction
The key issues involved in developing on-device network management systems for carrier-grade enterprise and operator networks are the same for any other networked resource, only with more complexity and built-in restrictions due to the limited space and processing capabilities inherent to these types of devices. The requirements for on-device network management systems will be reviewed in the context of the business and technical expectations of network operators that drive these requirements and their ever changing network environmental demands. Increasing levels of complexity and converging industry requirements are the key factors that are continuing to shape this unique industry segment.
New Services Increase Network Complexity
Modern networks have become increasingly sophisticated platforms for delivering data, voice, video, and wire-less services. Network management systems must adapt to meet new challenges. The old paradigm of humans administering networks with a “set and forget” approach is long gone. Customer expectations for network performance have never been higher. Users want applications and services available in their homes, offices, and every-where between – without interruption or limitations. Network operators and equipment vendors are working hard to make this a reality.
Competitive and economic forces are also affecting the networking industry. While the cost for the network equipment itself has been squeezed over many years, the cost for deploying new services and maintaining the networks has increased dramatically. Service providers and enterprises are constantly looking to reduce the operating cost of their networks as a means to become more competitive.
Enterprise and Carrier Requirements are Converging
Interestingly, the challenges facing CIOs of enterprises often mirror those of commercial service providers. Larger enterprise networks have many similarities with service provider networks. For example, the “five-nines” expectation for telco equipment has now crossed into the enterprise as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) penetration explodes. Users rightly expect a dial tone every time they pick up the phone whether it comes over a Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM) or an IP network.
Network Management Design Challenges
The developers of networking equipment and their network management systems must meet or exceed the expectations of network operators in an environment that is increasingly complicated.
The number of network devices and their form factors are proliferating. In addition to appliances and Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA) compliant chassis products, blade servers are being increasingly adopted for networking applications. The growth in the number of network devices requires multiple devices to be configured and supported for flexible high availability frameworks.
The number and complexity of required northbound management interfaces is also increasing. In addition to simple network management protocol (SNMP) and command line interface (CLI) agents, web and NETCONF/Extensible Markup Language (XML) interfaces are increasingly expected on most network devices. All these management interfaces must be synchronized to ensure consistency. Flexible provisioning and frequent re-con-figuration is needed to support multi-service networks. As if this was not enough, developers of networking equipment must bring complete solutions to market in less time, with constrained resources, and often using distributed teams responsible for modular components of the overall system.
High Availability
Up until recently, network management was not high on a network operator’s punch list for ensuring continuous availability. However, as networks become dependent on frequent software updates and dynamic service provisioning, this is changing.
Building a highly available network management application requires a powerful software fabric with capabilities including database replication, support for master-slave heart beat, full redundancy, hot failover, multiple levels of security access controls, complete analytical drill-down functionality and of course a full line of re-porting capabilities.
It is common for chassis-based network devices to have a separate management card managing individual line cards as shown in Figure 1. This capability requires an application programming interface (API) to make it pos-sible for the management cards to manage resources on other hosts.
Dual management cards should have the capability to be configured to ensure high availability, master-slave heart beat, and full redundancy. All configuration changes are always written to both management cards and when re-configuring the master all data is also replicated to the slave. Upon a failure of the master, the system will switch over to the slave and the slave will become active in the system. Some form of alerting, or warning, mechanism is necessary to notify network operations staff of the event and subsequent change in operational status of the device. Additionally, drill-down analytics is a necessity for the network operations staff enabling them to dive into the heart of any network event and ascertain the true cause and nature of the event.
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