2010 april edition

In the last newsletter (Jan 2010 edition), we talked about two factors that are critical in decision making in a high technology company – Cost and Control.

As a continuation of that discussion, in this newsletter, we will focus on two other factors that have also become equally if not more important when making a decision in a high technology company. They are Risk and Rapidity.

First let us examine the concept of rapidity - that is how soon a product can be delivered to the market. With the advances and widespread use of technology it is no secret that the pace of business and life has quickened. For example, Internet has shrunk time and distance. People have become accustomed to making purchases all over the world through the Internet and having it delivered to their doorstep with a mouse click. A major change has occurred in our lifestyle – we are not willing to wait! In other words even though the size of the business opportunity has grown (because of the growth of economies), the window of opportunity has been shrinking steadily. In effect, there is an enormous premium being out on the ability to meet this window of opportunity.

There are various risks associated in bringing a product to the market. In this discussion we will limit ourselves to the risk of not meeting the above mentioned window of opportunity. With the high premium put on being able to announce the product within the window of opportunity, the business risk of not meeting the window of opportunity has to be minimized as much as possible.

Recently I was involved in a situation with a company where the four factors Cost, Control, Risk and Rapidity came into play. This company was in a situation wherein they had to deliver a management application to one of their premier customers within a reasonable period of time. They tried doing the development in-house and unfortunately were not successful. Their customer was becoming increasingly impatient and the company was now faced with a choice of attempting to do the development in-house one more time or work with a third party such as Dhyan. When the company used the above four factors (Cost, Control, Risk and Rapidity) to evaluate the decision of working with Dhyan, this is how it played out.

Cost – When the decision of working with Dhyan was evaluated against the cost of developing it in-house; working with Dhyan had a cost advantage.

Control – Since customer was depending on Dhyan to deliver a management system, they felt that they were not in complete control of the technology that was being used and of the project.

Rapidity – It was clear to the customer that by using DNMS technology and leveraging its domain expertise, Dhyan would be able to deliver the management application quickly.

Risk – Because of Dhyan’s domain knowledge and its track record of successfully delivering management system projects, the risk of not being able to deliver the project on time to meet their customer’s needs was very low.

When Cost and Control were used as the decision making criteria, the option of going with Dhyan did not appear to be attractive; however, when Risk and Rapidity were also included in the decision making criteria then working with Dhyan came out as a better choice.

PS: The customer ended up going with Dhyan!

Dhyan Infotech Inc is a software and services company that helps Equipment Vendors differentiate their products in the market place. Dhyan's EMS technology, DNMS (Dhyan Network/Element Management System), is a component based Element Management System, which has been widely deployed by Dhyan's customers at many Service Providers both small and large

If you have questions on EMS or related topic that you would like to get answered or would like to write a guest column in this newsletter, please send an email to ems-energizer@dhyanit.com. This is a complimentary newsletter that was sent to you because of your interest in EMS. If you do not wish to receive this newsletter please click here to unsubscribe

Element Management Systems are designed to manage the network elements, but not many implementations emphasize the importance of the management system managing itself. Adding an additional piece of hardware such as another server to the management infrastructure might not appear very complicated from the hardware point of view but could increase the complexity when it comes time for the management system to manage itself. In the next few paragraphs we will examine the issues involved in building a resilient and self-managed management system.

One of the important attributes of a well managed management system is its capability of being able to back up key management data periodically such as the following:

	All user configurable information - requesting the user to go through all the configuration steps again doesn’t make sense.
	All user preferences configured in the management system
	Details about the inventory that is being tracked and managed. This includes details of each network element being managed along with the configuration information of that network element.
	Faults from a network element
	Performance statistics collected thus far which would help the users to review the performance of the network elements (considering the typical size of the performance data, this could be an expensive operation but is a very useful feature).

Finally any backup operation should be transaction safe i.e. the backed-up data should not contain any stale/intermediate data.

A backup operation is a time consuming operation and therefore the administrators should be given the option to schedule such activities during a scheduled maintenance window or during a period when the load on the server is light (for example Sunday midnight). In addition the administrator should also be given the option of being able to schedule the backup operation at a specific time.

On some rare occasions it is quite possible that disaster might strike the server that is hosting the management system. The management system should therefore be intelligent enough to transfer the backup file to a remote file server using ftp / secure-ftp protocol. Such a feature will also significantly improve the reliability and availability of the management application.

A manufacturer of a high-end switch was looking for a management system that would meet the needs of a large data center, specifically - scalability, fault tolerance, and high availability. During their evaluation process they observed that DNMS not only offered a very comprehensive and complete set of management features but it was also highly fault tolerant since it had a very reliable and efficient disaster recovery engine that was able to backup all its user configuration and inventory data.

One of the key features that impressed them was the way the DNMS backup engine was designed. It was designed and built so that it is able to efficiently capitalize on the built-in tools that are available in most common databases. By using these tools the DNMS backup engine can save significant amount of time during each backup cycle without missing any critical data. In addition, it was designed so that when the core DNMS information was backed up, it also automatically backed up the customization that was performed to the DNMS technology as well. This in turn saves quite a bit of time for the customization team.

DNMS’s backup component uses an efficient transaction locking mechanism which when backing up ensures that the backup doesn’t have any partially filled tables. It also allows performing of backups on the fly i.e. allows users to request for backups in an adhoc manner (whenever they perform an unplanned activity). Once a backup is taken, DNMS automatically transfers the file to the configured file-server which speeds up the recovery after a disaster.

The other key highlight of the DNMS’s backup component is its efficiency in managing the backup files i.e. the DNMS backup component doesn’t just stop at backing up the files, it also manages the backup files. For example, users can configure the backup component to maintain only the last “n” backup files in the file-server. Based on the configuration DNMS backup component automatically clears old backups as and when new backups are created. This option saves a lot of time for the network administrator since they do not have to worry about the growing disk-usage in the file-server and also helps them avoid periodic manual cleaning up of backup files.

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If you have any comments or questions or would like to write a guest column in the energizer, please send an email to
ems-energizer@dhyanit.com

This is a complimentary newsletter that was sent to you because of your interest in EMS. If you do not wish to receive this newsletter please click here to unsubscribe.

Participation in trade shows:

April 25 -29, 2010
Mandalay Bay Convention Center,
Las Vegas, Nevada

May 11 -13, 2010
Los Angeles Convention Center,
Los Angeles, CA

June 9 -11, 2010,
Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center, Washington, D.C

If you are interested in meeting with Dhyan representatives at the show please send email to
ems-energizer@dhyanit.com

We are designing the SNMP Agent for our network element. Do you have suggestions on how to build the reliable traps infrastructure?

Reliable traps option offers the flexibility for the management system to retrieve lost traps. Network elements use a sequence number for each trap being sent.

Whenever the management system receives a trap that is out-of-sequence it can connect to the network element and fetch the traps that were lost. While designing the Reliable traps MIB, it is advisable to follow two key strategies outlined below.
1.	Maintain a sequence number for each trap that is sent from each and every network element. Care should be taken to ensure that this sequence number is maintained as the key for the Trap table; this will ensure that it is fairly straightforward to fetch a lost trap. However, if the sequence number is maintained as part of a column instead of being the index then the number of SNMP queries to be done by the management system will increase.
2.	The trap table should have a set of columns that are able to accommodate the varbinds attached to each trap. Since each trap might have different set of varbinds, it is necessary to design the trap table efficiently so that it includes the correct set of columns.

Dear Ram,

We are in the process of testing the initial version of the EMS your team delivered late last month and it is holding up pretty well so far. On behalf of my team I wanted to thank you and your team for all of the hard work, dedication and delivering the initial version of the product on time. It is much appreciated.

Thanks once again
VP, Software