XML based Simple Network Management Protocol

Risk – it is a very powerful concept and businesses go to great lengths to minimize it

It is very apparent that every decision carries certain amount of risk - it is always present; however it is true that some of the decisions are riskier than others. The interesting part is that risk can be minimized but cannot be completely eliminated. It is like growing old – it happens as long as you are alive! Just as the alternative for not growing old is not very appealing (which is you die!), the alternative for eliminating risk completely is also not very appealing as well - which is you shut down your business

I recently encountered a situation which highlighted the concept of risk and minimization of it. I was in a discussion with the VP-Engg of a prospective customer who was exploring various options that were available to him for building a management system for his device (such as doing it in-house or working with a management system vendor). When it came to working with a management system vendor, he was concerned about losing control of his management program and felt that it could be a risky proposition (it is however interesting to note that even though he felt it was risky to work with a third party company on the management system, he was using silicon from a third party company to build his device instead of developing his own silicon)

It definitely is risky to be dependent on another company for any thing but I believe it would be wise to weigh that risk against the risk of doing it in-house. In this particular situation he did not have an in-house team readily available to work on the management application. If he wanted to do it in-house, he had to put together a team – a fairly time consuming process and the team would have to develop the application virtually from scratch - another expensive process in terms of time and money. By developing the management application in-house he might have minimized the risk of working with a partner and may feel that he has “control” of his management program; however in doing so, I believe he had signed up for some more riskier things (which are not quite visible) most notably, the risk that his team would be able to deliver their management application on time to meet his aggressive schedule and budget.

I believe these days technology and markets are moving too fast for any one company to do it all from scratch in-house (like the IBM, ATT of old days, leaders in their markets of computers and communications respectively). Additionally the investments that are required to do everything in-house are huge that most companies are shying away from taking such big risks all by themselves. In the olden days, when IBM or ATT brought out a product it took them a fairly long time (several years) and costed billions of dollars. It all changed with the breakup of ATT (in telecommunications) and with the advent of personal computers (in the computer industry). It is well known that up until entering the PC industry, IBM did everything in-house (silicon, hardware, operating system, to a certain extent even applications). However, IBM broke away from that mold for the first time in its history when it entered the PC industry – it used silicon from a small company called Intel! (at that time). It also bought the operating system for its PC from a virtually unheard of company called Microsoft! By working with third party companies, IBM took a big risk but was able to bring the product (IBM PC) to the market in record time. If instead IBM had chosen to do everything in house, it would have probably missed the boat on the PC industry – a bigger risk!

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

XML based Network Management Systems

Today the most commonly used protocol for network management is Simple Network Management Protocol or SNMP in short. SNMP protocol is widely deployed and supports the remote monitoring and management of the network from a centralized Network Operating Center (NOC). It is a reasonable technology for many network management tasks, but it has its limitations. In many cases, the SNMP based solution cannot be fully implemented without the implementation of proprietary MIBs.

Since the acceptance of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) has become highly successful in the industry for business-to-business integration, the XML based technology can be extended to the network management domain as well. The use of XML in network management offers many advantages some of which are listed below:

	better integration of management data from different sources
	more flexible link between managed object and the application
	tighter interoperability among management applications from different vendors
	easy and powerful rendering and transformation of management information
	automatic and centralized validation for management data.

Most existing network devices are already embedded with SNMP agents and are managed by SNMP managers. To migrate a SNMP based management system to a XML based management system, one needs to replace SNMP based managers and SNMP agents with XML-based managers and XML agents. In situations where there are not too many devices in the network it might be feasible to replace all the SNMP agents with XML agents. However if there are thousands of devices in the network with embedded SNMP agents then it might not be feasible to replace all those SNMP agents with XML agents. In such cases, a more practical way of moving to a XML based management system would be to replace the SNMP manager with a XML manager and use a XML/SNMP gateway so that the XML manager can interact and manage the SNMP agents.

In the next few paragraphs, we will take a closer look at the XML Manager and XML Agent

In a XML manager, the web server is the core component. It is responsible for handling user requests from the management application, receiving asynchronous notification messages from the devices (via HTTP), exchanging synchronous management information with agents and interacting with the database to persist information about managed objects.

The XML technology provides the ability to model the managed objects using XML Schema or Document type definition (DTD) in a flexible manner. By adopting some simple conventions, the objects modeled through XML Schema can be successfully displayed in the Web-based client applications. Availability of standard APIs and technologies like XPath helps easy access and manipulation of management data very quickly. Web Service Description Language (WSDL) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) define web services for powerful high-level management operations.

Widely deployed protocols such as HTTP are used for reliable transfer of management data. For notification delivery, the communication model must provide an asynchronous communication method. However, HTTP is strictly a request response protocol from a client to a server. This means that the agent cannot send an event message to the manager asynchronously. By adding a HTTP client in the agent and HTTP server in the manager, this problem can be solved easily.

It is very efficient to store and retrieve information from a native XML database rather than using a relational database. The native XML database stores the data, structured as XML, without having to translate the data into a relational or object database structure. This is especially valuable for complex and hierarchical XML structures that might be difficult or impossible to map to a more structured database.

The basic component of the XML-based agent is the Embedded Web Server (EWS). The components added to the EWS are the XML processor, and the HTTP Client Engine. An important design consideration while adding XML agent to devices is the availability of memory and processor speed. Since XML supports various kinds of parsers, based on the memory footprint available on the embedded device, it is recommended that a lightweight XML parser be selected.

A VoIP equipment manufacturer needed to provide as part of its centralized management solution, an application that would allow end–user customer of the service provider to configure the services that they had signed up with the service provider. The end-user customers of the service provider would be interacting with the management system of the VOIP manufacturer through a web based application developed by the service provider.

This meant that the configuration data that was sent by the end-user had to be verified and stored in the network manager for authentication, billing and other management purposes while at the same time it had to be also passed on to the network devices for service activation. Another major constraint for the management system was that the interface should be flexible so that it could be easily integrated with service provider systems. The final constraint was that for various reasons, the embedded agent software on the device could not be customized.

This requirement was implemented using Netconf based configuration which was based on Web services and SOAP. A software based XML/SNMP gateway was developed and made to co-exist with the element management system. These two systems together provided the necessary authentication, data storage and retrieval as well as logging of end-user activities. The data sent by the end-user would reach the gateway as XML messages over HTTP link and the gateway notified the management system and finally the device was also updated with the same configuration information over SNMP.

This allowed the end-users to directly change their service subscriptions and/or activations. Since the application was fully integrated with the existing management system, all the requisite information that was required for service management and billing was captured. The challenges that were encountered when implementing the above solution will be explored in the next newsletter. Stay tuned!

____________________________________________________________________________________

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:

October 26 - 30, 2008
Hynes Convention Center,
Boston, MA, USA

November 4 - 6, 2008
Fairmont Hotel
San Jose, CA, USA

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

What are the efforts taken for standardization of XML-based network management systems?

Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) is an initiative by the Distributed Management Task Force (DTMF), to formulate a set of industry standards that an enterprise can use to manage its operations in the distributed computing environment on the Internet. This standard offers a Common Information Model (CIM), which is an XML encoded data and transmitted using HTTP.

IETF XML Configuration (XMLCONF) Working Group initially started with exploring the possibilities of using the existing XML technologies (like SOAP etc.), to build network configuration management. Later, the NETCONF (network configuration) Working Group was chartered to produce a protocol (NetConf) for network configuration. This protocol uses XML for data encoding purposes, because XML is a widely deployed standard and supports hierarchical data structures.

The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) has released the Telecommunications Markup Language (tML), a standard to govern telecommunications network management. The tML, an extension of XML, provides a standard definition for the development of interoperable interfaces between Telecommunications entities, within the TMN context. It explains the guidelines for development of tML schemas for definition of tML data to be exchanged for administration, maintenance, and provisioning interfaces.

Dear Ram,

I wanted to give you feedback on the proof of concept demonstration that we saw last week (which was built using DNMS technology).

The team here was quite impressed with the proof of concept demo in terms of the functionality that was demonstrated to us. We were thrilled at how well it captured our thoughts and helped us visualize the management application clearly. Finally, we were pleasantly surprised at the speed at which your team was able to get the proof of concept completed - it was truly impressive and demonstrated the flexibility of your DNMS technology.

Dhyan team did a very professional and thorough job in collecting the input from us and conducted multiple architectural reviews of the design to ensure that the proof of concept captured all our key requirements.

Thanks for a job well done. It was a pleasure working with your team!

Sincerely,

Sr. Product Manager