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

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.

Inventory and Topology Mapping: Visualizing the Chaos

You would think the IT folks would have a pretty good handle of their telecom assets and equipment. But in many cases, their infrastructure has grown past the chaos stage. Sheer volume of devices and applications require inventory and mapping tools to manage and control system environments. 

Think of an inventory and topology mapping application as an Org Chart for your networking gear. One can see the spatial relationship of the device and their links, and see the status and performance of between them.  Then the mapping can be traced back to the system engineer or operator who is responsible for them. As an audit feature, user actions are recorded with timestamps. One may think this is a bit of corporate Big Brother, but knowing who did what and when to a device is imperative in resolving issues, troubleshooting and keeping the network up.

Once inventory and mapping are known, decision-making processes flow more efficiently and improve operator productivity. The mechanics of the network management application is to perform a “Discovery" or a scan of the network elements and provide physical and logical links between devices. Discovery spans from Layer 2 to all the way up to discovery at applications layer. The common  protocols for discovery are CDP, LLDP, PING, SNMP, TL1, CORBA for the infrastructure discovery and  protocols like RMI, SOAP, REST etc., for the application discovery. It’s like a CAT Scan of your system environment. Once mapping is complete, many out-of-the-box metrics are available for current and historical trending performance.  his is just another hammer in the network engineer’s toolbox to keep systems up and running. It also gives management a quick visual of the hot zones.

Many companies struggle to even get through the discovery phase. The environment is constantly changing. Engineers are pulled away to fight fires. End-users, internal or external, start pointing fingers and it becomes a pissing match. No one wins and it gets escalated to top management.

Even in mature organizations, there can be siloed systems that have been operating and working well for years. If there are truly no integration points or data sharing, then map it as its own entity. But a No Integration situation is a rarity. Data is useful or impacts other data. I have seen situations were integration is a bigger chore on the organizational process than the integration work itself. Sometimes management is even unaware problems exist. Without a mapping application, they are flying blind.  People rely on what’s in their heads and when anyone leaves the company, a new level of chaos rises up.

Inventory discovery and mapping connections start a discipline that makes the operator staff accept a common data source. Since this data source is fluid, re-discovery can happen on a daily basis. It can be a real eye-opener.  It’s a snapshot in time where leadership can act upon, prioritize tasks and assign the right people. If network or device changes are necessary, you can establish the process to get the right people to approve, assign the right people to perform, then see an audit if it needs to be revisited. Over time, it becomes routine and fire fighting is reduced. Granted, you will need to carry out some interventions, but organizational changes will work given a common data set. Knowledge is shared equally and the focus can be on the problem and less on the communications.

In today’s new cloud environment, it does not mean cloud assets need to be isolated. They can be part of hybrid inventory and mapping picture. CIOs may struggle with the idea of cloud infrastructure, but knowing what’s there and how it is performing bridges the confidence gap.

US House voted to prevent any increased U.N. Internet regulation

The House voted unanimously on Thursday to approve a resolution aimed at preventing any efforts to hand the United Nations more power to oversee the Internet.

The resolution had previously cleared the House Energy and Commerce Committee with a unanimous vote.

More on the topic:
http://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2012/08/house-unanimously-approves-un-internet-resolution/57207/?oref=nextgov_today_nl