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

Carrier Ethernet OAM Part 2

Standards bodies are defining the data collection, which is a good thing and could keep costs down. Discovering switches, the ports and E-line/E-Lan services configured in the switch can be made available in an inventory list view. Logical elements like services, UNIs, endpoints and profiles can also be captured by a discovery filter. These objects can be seen both under a network database list view and a Carrier Ethernet physical map. However, scale, high availability and the integration story is cloudy and can ultimately drive the costs up. Developing to a complex integration standard costs money. The end goal really is to enable informed, proactive management and swift problem resolution that effectively runs their operations.

To overcome the management challenge, we (and others) have pre-built object models to support standards-based equipment and extend the object model, which can be mapped to support various equipment.

There can be better control over networks with flow-through automation, real-time QoS performance and bandwidth monitoring that accelerates time-to-market and ensures customer Service Level Agreements (SLAs) via standards.

Performance monitoring and health checking can be real-time or historical on service and can go down to a port, EVC utilization or transmission errors, and perform QoS thresholds and KPIs. For fault, you can use RFC2544FdAlarm and RFC2544JitterAlarm that can are parsed and correlated into meaningful actionable alarms. Class-of-service flows can allow for testing of throughput, latency and jitter. The network can be engineered for different traffic priorities.

Configuration, activation and monitoring of RFC2544 tests as well as threshold definitions and notification reception can be supported. Provisioning the Ethernet services and OAM profiles can be accomplished via a user interface.  Logical elements like services, endpoints, UNIs, NNIs, and ports can be added. Various profiles like bandwidth profile, performance profile, an RFC2544 profile and CFM profile can be added and the same can be associated to endpoints of a service. 

The scaling challenge is always present and if architected correctly, management systems can scale to very large sizes. One way to accommodate scale is to use multi-threading data collection in a distributed hardware environment or virtual machines. This distributed data collection can roll up to a centralized backend to handle the correlation business logic, performance KPIs and reporting across the network.

High availability can be accomplished by hardening the OS and providing standby hardware and using database replication techniques (a topic for a future blog).

Lastly, system integration between management systems and OSS and BSS systems need not be expensive and standards bodies can tend to go overboard. Technologies can be accomplished using the cloud model by publishing an SOAP or REST API and using accepted industry protocols, which will keep costs down. The technology exists today — use it.

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

Carrier Ethernet OAM Part 1

Service providers are determining where there is a need for more fiber and what kind of reach it can go to the rural communities. As more network elements are deployed to keep up with bandwidth demand, so is there an increased importance in scale for network management and monitoring performance.

First step is data collection. If you can't see it, you can't manage and control it. Beyond the Carrier Ethernet NOC, questions are being asked. What do customers want? What do service providers want? There is a growing need for speed for consumers and enterprises. We are seeing incremental increases in bandwidth speed all the time. 

A little historical perspective: Remember when the Hayes 9600 bit modem put the internet in the hands of the masses? Remember when a T1 was thousands per month? Speeds increase, costs come down. It's a classic case of economics and technology innovation.

Service providers want to see their costs go down. As bandwidth demand increases, their revenue is not moving in a parallel line to it. As customers see the advantages of higher speed, the service providers want to see the money. A bigger pipe just gets you so far.

Are you willing to pay for higher SLAs? Yes, enterprises are asking for it. Willing to pay extra for security? Certainly the government and military demand and pay for it. It would make sense that enterprises with sensitive information would pay for extra security. Are you willing to pay for higher quality or a class of service? Sure, but only if there is a portal for customers to see their service usage stats, performance metrics and can provision for their needs.

Back to the Carrier Ethernet NOC story. Controlling, measuring and reporting Ethernet service in a standards-based way across services and across vendors is a key to helping service providers with business continuity and reducing OPEX. Although the MEF-Ethernet management model has an established baseline, not all of the Carrier Ethernet vendors use standard MIBs and implement their own RFCs to support OAM and CFM by querying custom CLI command sets. Every service provider has a hodgepodge of systems that do different functions. That's the way it is, by design, best of breed or by legacy of investment. There are two ways to go about this, a unified system or an integrated approach.