Australia pays it forward.

Australia pays the Central Bank $8.5 Billion to strengthen their balance sheet.  Are they looking into their crystal ball and seeing the future or just hedging a bet?  Or is it just a situation like where a business does a stock buy back?  In terms of the amount for a country like Assieland, it is not a lot, but it does send a signal.

Source:  http://www.nasdaq.com/article/australia-gives-central-bank-billions-citing-global-risks-20131023-00071

Broadsoft VoIP Management and Continuous Monitoring

When you pick up the phone, there's an expectation of the call going through. Voice over IP (VoIP) has been with us since the mid-to-late 1990s and the expectation remains the same. In the early days you could hear the choppy latency. Yet now, carrier-class scale and new functional features are just as important as call clarity and reduced latency. Switching to VoIP saves on service and infrastructure costs and has moved from Hobbyist to a mainstream alternative to the old switching gear and POTS line. 

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An innovator and leader in software-based VoIP solutions for service providers is Broadsoft. Their product portfolio is called Broadworks and is used to delivery unified communications for voice and multimedia services over Ethernet, fiber, mobile or cable. The Broadworks solution offers voice messaging and conferencing, and personal calling functions such as call forwarding, simultaneous ring and dial-by-name. 

The components include an Application Server database that maintains user and group profiles, as well as service and subscription data, a centralized SIP Network Server responsible for location services, dial plan/digit translation and routing policies, a Media Server enabling announcements, record, playback. digit detection, mixing and repeating functions over scripting languages like VoiceXML and CCXML, as well as media control protocols such as NetAnn and MSCML and an Access Mediation Server supporting Skinny Call Control Protocol (SCCP) and SIP device across the enterprise.

Managing and controlling their system infrastructure is the Broadworks Element Management System (EMS). It performs fault processing, performance metrics and configuration of BroadWorks Application Servers, Network Servers and Media Servers. The Broadworks EMS is a single pane of glass for the system management functions and a network wide view for health and performance.

The Operations, Administration, Maintenance, and provisioning (OAM&P) interfaces utilize SNMPv3, XML and CLI and runs on a NEBS-complaint, x86-64 hardware with the Linux operating system. Fault-alarm collection is done via SNMP to diagnose system and network problems and looks for potential performance degradations. Alarming indicates server issues, protocol problems, system failovers and supports alarm suppression, auto-clearing and correlation. Solaris and Linux syslogs are converted into EMS events and are used to do further troubleshooting for malfunctioning end points in the network.

From an EMS GUI perspective, operators can view all event and alarms conditions and dynamically customize performance thresholding to tune the system for better health status accuracy. Performance monitoring looks at server metrics like CPU utilization, memory, swap spaces and database counters. In addition, operators can generate exportable XML system performance reports and perform routine system polices such as software imaging and backups. All configuration changes, adds and deletes are logged into a audit trail.

Administrators can push server upgrades via the Broadworks EMS without bringing down the system. The CLI interface provides commands in quick, easy-to-understand syntax for system administration. For Northbound integration, Broadworks EMS supports SNMP, HTTPS and SOAP and also integrates with RADIUS or LDAP to authenticate for security and for real-time call data for third-party accounting applications.  The Broadworks application can be extended to third party developers and integrators via REST APIs.

The total system is architected for automatic geographic redundancy to achieve the highest levels of reliability and performance. Server and device agents generate alarms in the event of a failure. It addresses potential points of failure at several points: the Broadworks EMS, the BroadWorks servers and the service provider’s IP network. All layers are deployed in primary/secondary redundant pairs or clusters. In the event that the primary server fails, or is inaccessible, it is routed the secondary server. This is not a trivial exercise and requires specialized engineering at the EMS, OS, database and hardware levels to achieve 99.999 percent uptimes.

As the Broadworks system is deployed by several Tier 1 carriers in their IMS systems, Broadsoft is geared up for Voice over LTE (VoLTE) and supports 3GPP Release 9 specifications and IR.92 compliance, thus expanding capabilities, increasing operational efficiency and reducing operating costs for service providers.

Management at Mobile World Congress, 2013

Mobile World Congress can be described in one word – massive. It is by far the largest mobile trade show in the world. The venue was changed to the Fira which gave it a more intimate feel. The show floors were closer together and it seems people have more access to the vendors than last year.

The business needs still remain. The growing number of devices requires scalable management software to monitor and control them. One contrast from last year appeared to be fewer vendors in the performance management and Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) space.

Another observation was there were less mobile app developer firms, but interesting to see Firefox and Ubuntu getting into the mobile OS space.

The Mobile Device Management (MDM) and how to deal with BYOD has picked up. ManageEngine Desktop Central introduced MDM last year at the show and has continued the R&D and marketing efforts.  It supports iOS and Android tablet and smartphones.  Just handling the inventory/asset management and configuring policy settings within the enterprise is the first step. Then baseline security policies and being able to distribute and manage both in-house and commercial apps are next. Lastly, performing audits and reporting on what is in the enterprise is part of rollout. The typical customer is the enterprise, but it's interesting to see specialty device vendors looking to OEM Mobile Device Management to offer an all around solution.

As in last year’s blog, the M2M was starting to gain momentum. This year it's really taking off.  There are many new vendors offering Smart Home/City and Power Grid equipment. Several of the big players were touting M2M management. When pressed to see a demo, one admitted that it is in the very early development stage  When they heard of the WebNMS M2M framework and how it could be customized and extended with flexible GUI look and feel and open APIs, the tuned changed and there was some genuine interest. Build vs. buy decision points. And building is an expensive proposition.

Cloud infrastructure and Cloud Management is still center on people's foreheads. There was talk about Cloud management applications for small and medium sized customers. Think of it as a Cloud NOC. 

I feel the Element and Network Management Systems will be an on-premise type of application for the near future. Scale and dependences around the OS, hardware and database and especially around security are the driving reasons. However, pushing customer fault and performance data to the Cloud is in demand and doable today.

Connecting the Internet: Alcatel-Lucent's Open API Platform

There is a huge trend of connecting Internet applications via REST APIs. The service providers are opening up their networks and providing access to core assets in ways unforeseen, presenting opportunities to innovative developers, which in turn drives up bandwidth usage and revenue. These APIs are a means for communication transactions and the use cases vary dramatically. Many are GPS location and mapping or social/media file sharing or SMS/MMS based services. Several are business and productivity integration types.

One challenge for a service provider is to monitor, control and secure these API transactions. As the volume and the importance of the API call to go through both climb, so does the need for management. To solve this, Alcatel-Lucent has a framework called the Open API Platform. It allows a service provider or large enterprise to expose APIs and allow data to be shared between applications; however, it's much more than exposing an API. Monitoring and control in a Carrier Class environment is a different animal. It includes a single place to onboard third-party API application developers and partners, manage and perform analytics and monetize the services. The platform transforms API hooks to the native or proprietary interfaces of underlying systems in a clearly defined and secure model.

The Open API Platform provides a front door for developers to create APIs and to provision their applications. They configure application parameters and create rules for how they can be used, the number of transactions that are allowed, etc. Then they are able to view their own performance on which APIs are heavily used, the transaction times, and on how the APIs perform. The platform also has a business management system to set up billing.

The platform has a System Management Portal (SMP) that looks at the health and performance of the framework and is responsible for functional FCAPS (Fault, Configuration, Accounting, Performance and Security). It can reside at the service provider NOC or be installed in the cloud running on a rack with Linux and MySQL.  Centralization of the management functions is key to operations and keeping costs down. Not all environments are alike and customizing the System Management Portal adds to the importance.

The framework infrastructure has several servers and services gateways. From a fault point of view, the SMP handles traps from equipment and applications and looks for health checks, capacity warnings, system degradations and conditions like split brain between instances of applications. It performs alarm correlation, alarm groupings and has auto-clearing features.

From a performance KPI point of view, SMP polls for CPU, process metrics, disk utilization and overload status. There is a separate server dedicated to API analytics and reporting on messages per second, duration, popularity of user types and profitability statistics. 

SMP also provides a log file management as a debugging and troubleshooting tool and a policy-management capability to schedule automated routine tasks and perform clean-ups and backups. SMP employs northbound SNMP feeds to other management applications to support management integration. From a NOC operator point of view, the SMP dashboard can be customized for their particular role and provide access and views to certain equipment or customers. The goal is to make sure the network entities are intact and provide a high degree of reliability.

Service providers are now enabled to strategically expose APIs, help drive innovation and gain new revenue streams, while at the same time allowing third-party developers and partners to enhance the end-user mobile device experience.

Eric Wegner is a 20-year veteran of the software industry and has 12 years of experience with ZOHO Corp. (formerly AdventNet) working on large and complex network management infrastructures for network equipment manufacturers, service providers and military contractors. http://www.webnms.com