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102 Network Management: Open Source Solutions to Proprietary Problems
Shane O'Donnell, OpenNMS
Network management has long been either the boon or
bane of network managers for years, and all too often, experiences have been
less than favorable. Typically, today's network manager has one of two choices
for monitoring their network devices for availability and performance: to
deploy multiple point solutions, typically on multiple platforms, to handle
heterogeneous devices, or to invest heavily in a "framework"
solution, which is costly to deploy, and difficult to show a ROI.
Compounded by a lack of standards and vendor
competition, the problems of the network management industry are almost always
felt in academia first. In few other places in the industry today are networks
of comparable size and heterogeneity deployed, and nowhere else are the budgets
for network management so tight. This
has created a need for tools that meet immediate needs, and often, these tools
are built in-house as a result of "skunkworks"-type projects. And while these tools address today's needs,
they are often unsupportable and "future-susceptible", where they
wither following the loss of key personnel.
OpenNMS has created the Bluebird project, an open
source effort intended to provide a standards-based, platform-independent
network and services monitoring suite of tools. Based on Java and XML, Bluebird has been architected to be
distributed and scalable, and focuses not only on the "reachability"
of the resource, but on its ability to respond to application-level requests.
Bluebird is the direct result of an attempt to
leverage existing tools as a basis for a simple availability reporting
tool. When it became apparent that were
no solutions that both provided the necessary information and were economically
feasible in the university networking market, OpenNMS began pursuing options in
the "open source" realm. With
the reliability of open source operating systems as an example to the industry,
the project team held initial design meetings that focused on the university
environment--what are the needs, what are the requirements, what are the
critical success factors?
This technical presentation will focus on the
availability of network management tools, a comparison of the "free"
network management marketplace, and the architecture of Bluebird. Elements discussed within the architecture
include some of the key design decisions made and why, the obstacles presented
by both the network management industry and network element providers, key
successes realized in the academic computing marketspace, and an overall
"state of the project".
Please note: OpenNMS is releasing Bluebird as open source, which means that there is no charge (nor will there ever be one) for the Bluebird software. The source code is currently available for download, and upon initial release, will be packaged as a set of executables.