4 Integration in the management environment

 The result of the process described in the previous sections are native CORBA management agents. In order to exploit the functionality presented by these agents, it is necessary to provide means of implementing CORBA-compliant management applications. The obvious way to achieve a native CORBA-based management solution is to develop management applications and management platforms as well as agents in the form of distributed CORBA objects communicating through an ORB. Unfortunately, at the current stage of available implementations, scalable management solutions based exclusively on CORBA are not yet possible. Furthermore, integrated management environments span different architectural domains. Therefore, so-called management gateways (see e.g. (Kalyanasundaram and Sethi, 1994; McCarthy et al., 1995)) bridging the gaps between the involved management architectures are needed. By using gateways, we are able to manage services, systems and networks in three different management architectures from a single point of control. It is even possible to apply most of the power of the OSI management architecture to any resource in the different architectural domains. Therefore, our design guideline was to take the ``best of breed'' of the three management architectures (OSI, Internet, CORBA). We have used off-the-shelf products and tied them together in order to form an integrated service, system and network management prototype.

As the OSI management architecture yields by far the largest set of management functionality, we decided to take an OSI-compliant management platform as the core of our distributed management prototype (see Figure 5). For the sake of brevity, we can only sketch the approach.

  

Figure 5: Interoperability between different management architectures

The IBM NetView TMN Support Facility (Feridun et al., 1995) provides all the necessary features for managing OSI/TMN-compliant management agents. Since SNMP agents are widespread, an integrated management solution needs to take into account the Internet management domain. It was therefore necessary to develop a CMIP/SNMP management gateway (Langer, 1996) for this purpose allowing the management of SNMP agents from an OSI managing system. Our implementation makes use of the IIMC (ISO-Internet Management Coexistence) concepts for achieving interoperability between the OSI and Internet management architectures. In management architectures such as the Internet framework that have no notion of a management functional model, the application of management functionality ``borrowed'' from other architectures is particularly useful. A typical example for this is to enhance the Internet management architecture with management functionality like threshold monitoring or event processing defined by the OSI Systems Management Functions. The integration of CORBA into our distributed management system has also been done through the gateway approach making the defined ODP-compliant GAMOCs and the derived application-specific MOCs accessible from different management architectures.