An Architectural Approach for Integrated Network and Systems Management

摘要

Today's enterprises are accepting networked systems as a fundamental part of their information technology strategy. The constant growth in quantity and quality of networked systems and the thereby arising problems concerning complexity, heterogeneity and diversity of components in a multi-vendor environment require a sophisticated management of resources. Increasingly the automation of such management is being demanded. In this paper we introduce an architecture for the integrated management of all resources in a networked system, i.e. application, system and network resources. The architecture uses domains as flexible and pragmatic means of grouping resources and of specifying management responsibility and authority boundaries. It maintains a clear distinction between management objectives and the resources being managed in order to provide an integrated view of the various tasks of management as well as an integrated and uniform view of the distributed and heterogeneous managed environment. The uniform management model on which the architecture is based is expressive enough to capture the full richness of management structures and policies both within enterprises and between them. It allows for recursive and generic structuring, we consider as the basis for management activity automation. As an example, we apply our architectural concepts to structure the management of a high speed multi-network (ATM, DQDB, FDDI). Emphasis lies on an automated Quality of Service management in the FDDI management domain.