Wednesday, December 12, 2012

GENBAND Unified OAM Management Application, GENView

With advancements in long-haul and broadband technologies triggering an explosion in packet data traffic, service providers have moved much of their data traffic onto more efficient packet networks. They are now looking toward Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) as a means to derive revenue from voice, but also other multimedia services while providing a unified management console and helping reduce OPEX.

GENBAND is a global leader of IP infrastructure solutions, enabling service providers and enterprises around the world to evolve communications networks through IP innovation. The company offers market-leading switching, applications, networking and service solutions, with products deployed in more than 600 customer networks spanning more than 80 countries. GENBAND provides customers with high-performance communication equipment (telephony, video, Internet, and wireless services) to deliver secured quadruple-play and converged services on IP networks.

Focusing on maximizing savings, increasing network simplicity and providing new sources of revenue, GENBAND introduced the GENView Manager, a best-in-class, unified operations, administration, maintenance and provisioning system that provides operations support and readiness, fulfillment, assurance and billing (OFAB, including traditional FCAPS) functionality for network operators. Based on high availability, highly scalable client/server environments, GENView Manager provides the ease-of-use and scale required for even the largest of network deployments.

This single unified interface for all the network elements means a significant reduction in integration times and costs. The main functional services with the GENBAND GENView Manager system include fault processing, performance analysis, configuration management and security management as well as a northbound interface to OSS systems. In addition, network topology tools provide a good visibility into the network issues for maintainability and problem resolution.

The system architecture is tiered providing aggregation of GENBAND network elements for scaling purposes to meet larger network requirements. GENView Manager has a backend server for data collection and correlation logic, a front end to present the Graphical User Interface and a database layer for persistence. GENView Manager operates in a replicated high availability configuration to minimize service outages or downtime, thereby protecting customer service-level metrics and ensure service continuity. It can reside on ATCA blade in the GENBAND GENiUS platform, or in a standalone Rack Mount Server, managed from a different location within the service provider’s network.

GENBAND GENView Manager infrastructure uses a diverse set of management protocols including standards such as SNMP and CORBA as well as custom protocols. Fault processing includes business logic to determine root-cause analysis. Alarm filtering and correlation is performed to avoid duplicate faults. NOC operators can drill down from an alarm to a graphical shelf level and view the chassis to see exactly where and what is going on. Alarm resynchronization with network element and OSS enable a reliable and robust fault capability.

Performance management performs the data collection and can threshold at the network element and applications levels and generates crossing alerts. Custom graphing and reporting can easily be accomplished. Then performance data is aggregated to a northbound OSS interface.

Configuration management allows NOC operators to control the system by initiating configuration operations such as firmware upgrades, patching, backup/restore, application management and high availability settings.

GENBAND customers have high expectations around security and GENView Manager treats it as an essential service and a key differentiator. To harden its system, GENBAND typically secures NMS-to-NE communications with protocols such as SSH, SFTP, IPsec and SNMPv3 – depending on customer requirements. All communication: southbound, northbound and between the GUI client server is secure via SSL. GENView Manager uses a password encrypted single sign-on (SSO) to ensure a seamless and solid operation to their authentication, authorization and auditing (AAA) module. It can also be accessed remotely via HTTPS.  Authentication is achieved via a RADIUS-supported central security server with configurable password-reset policies. The central security server can also be integrated into the customer AAA system using standard protocols such as Radius and LDAP. Authorization is a simplified user and group management module that restricts views or operations. Auditing records user operations on a per element basis.

Other GENBAND security measures include: pushing performance data via secure FTP, hardening the OS, using restricted ports, conducting periodic vulnerability scans, developing rules to better manage loads, and enforcing rigorous backup/restore procedures to protect data from being corrupted.

Another key component to the service provider’s environment is a northbound interface that enables interoperability and unification into a single-point management. To accomplish, GENBAND correlates data and employs JMX (Java Management Extensions) as a means of a northbound interface for faults, performance data and system configurations.

GENBAND, an innovative leader deployed in Tier 1 service providers around the world, sets the standard with the unified management system, GENView Manager, and is committed to responsiveness and service to its customers.

Eric Wegner works for Zoho Corp, http://www.webnms.com

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