Tail f Systems Whitepaper - Top Ten Management Issues for ATCA
0 likes1,068 views
The document discusses the top ten issues for managing AdvancedTCA (ATCA) systems and how Tail-f Systems addresses them. It describes challenges like short product life cycles, supporting multiple management interfaces, integrating third party software, and ensuring high availability, security, performance and standards compliance. Tail-f Systems provides model-driven development tools that auto-generate management interfaces and integrate technologies to help vendors manage multi-vendor environments and automate service provisioning while reducing development time and costs.
Tail f Systems Whitepaper - Top Ten Management Issues for ATCA
- 1. Tail-f Systems Whitepaper Top Ten Issues for ATCA Management Introduction The AdvancedTCA (ATCA) standard is a flexible, open systems approach to developing telecommunications platforms and 2011 marks the 10th year anniversary of its inception. ATCA has done much to achieve its original goals of reducing both costs and time-to-market. There are many hardware and software components that must come together to make a successful ATCA- based system and network management is critical among them. Network management is needed to configure and monitor individual systems (on-device management) and centrally manage multiple distributed systems (EMS or NMS platforms). This paper describes Tail-f Systems’ view on what we see as the top ten issues driving network management for ATCA-based systems. 1. Compressed Product Life Cycles The management software required for a modern networking product is always on the critical path for production release of new products. New and improved approaches to developing network management applications must be adopted if engineering organizations are to achieve their objectives of delivering new systems in less time and with less cost. Tail-f Systems pioneered the application of model-driven engineering to the development of network Tail-f Systems’ Advantage: management platforms. At a time when legacy approaches to provisioning telecommunications services and configuring networking equipment are slow and expensive, model-driven development represents a breakthrough for developers of both on-device and EMS/NMS platforms. Capabilities, like the auto-rendering of critical northbound interfaces and pre-integration with control plane software, significantly reduce development time. 2. Multiple Management Interfaces It is not uncommon for modern networking platforms to support four or more management interfaces. For example, SNMP for monitoring, a CLI for technical administrators, a Web Interface for simpler management tasks, and NETCONF for automated configuration. Developing management platforms to support multiple interfaces can drive up engineering costs and extend development schedules. This is especially the case when each management interface is treated as a silo and needs separate coding and instrumentation. Tail-f Systems provides an intelligent software backplane that auto-generates multiple management Tail-f Systems’ Advantage: interfaces from a single model. This approach avoids writing separate application code for each management interface and ensures consistent operations across all interfaces. Tail-f Systems is a leading contributor to the YANG modeling language (RFC 6020). YANG is ideally suited to requirements of configuration management - easily read and understood by human implementers, and provides mechanisms to validate models of configuration data for semantics and syntax. Tail-f Systems © 2011 Page 1 of 5
- 2. Tail-f Systems Whitepaper 3. Management in a Multi-vendor World Managing network equipment from multiple vendors has always been a challenge for network operators. People, software, and training costs together with increased complexity make dealing with multiple management systems a challenge. Tail-f Systems helps suppliers of ATCA-based systems address this issue from two perspectives. Tail-f Systems’ Advantage: First, Tail-f Systems’ ConfD enables developers to auto-render on-device management interfaces that support key industry standards. NETCONF (RFC 4741) is a standardized method to install, manipulate, and delete the configuration of network devices and through support for SNMP, an ATCA-based system can be monitored from a wide range of third party managers. ConfD can also generate Cisco and Juniper-style CLIs. These interfaces are de facto industry standards and easily integrated into existing management environments. Second, Tail-f Systems NCS allows developers to rapidly build fully functional EMS platforms. Again, support for industry standard interfaces and APIs (southbound and northbound) eases the pain of integrating new systems into a multi-vendor management regime. An EMS application developed with NCS can configure NETCONF-based devices, manage SNMP alerts and manage Cisco devices with Tail-f’s Cisco CLI Engine. The Cisco CLI Engine both renders and parses CLI commands from a single data model, significantly reducing the amount of coding effort compared to CLI scripting. 4. Integration and Management of Third Party Software Equipment vendors benefit from using off-the-shelf hardware and software components to deliver new products quickly and affordably. Third party software applications like routing protocols, operating systems, and other control plane applications all must be configured and managed. The management interfaces for these applications are often limited and require considerable engineering resources to augment and integrate into a consistent and fully featured management platform. Tail-f Systems provides a powerful management framework with intelligent APIs that streamline integration Tail-f Systems’ Advantage: with other applications. In addition, Tail-f Systems has pre-integrated our management technology with a number of industry leading software products and frameworks, including software from IP Infusion and Metaswitch, as well as OpenSAF high availability middleware. Both Tail-f Systems’ ConfD and NCS include built-in, high-performance databases. Optimized for the demands of configuration management, these databases include support for versioning, transactions, rollbacks, subscription-based programming, and backup capabilities. 5. High Availability The requirement for high availability in the telecommunications industry is well understood. Just as there are multiple hardware and software-based strategies used to achieve high reliability, network management systems must also be architected to support high availability. Management software developed with Tail-f technology fully delivers on the expectations for high availability Tail-f Systems’ Advantage: with support for 1:N database replication, integration with HA middleware, and support for in-service upgrades. Tail-f Systems © 2011 Page 2 of 5
- 3. Tail-f Systems Whitepaper 6. Automated Service Provisioning and Network Configuration Service providers are under pressure to react faster to market requirements and, at the same time, squeeze out any excess operating expenses. To achieve these objectives, service activation and configuration management must be fully automated from order fulfillment through service provisioning and on to configuration changes. To avoid service disruptions, configuration changes in the network elements must be made in lockstep and only committed to live production if they can all be executed consistently for all parameters. Tail-f Systems is a leading provider of technology solutions for automated service activation and Tail-f Systems’ Advantage: configuration management. All Tail-f solutions support the NETCONF protocol (RFC 4741), providing such capabilities as transaction management, change validation and rollback management. Tail-f Systems’ implementations of NETCONF are mature and thoroughly proven in production networks. Our participation and contribution to the development of the standard ensures our customers benefit from fully future-proofed technology. 7. Complying with Industry Standards A wide variety of standards impact the management of ATCA-based systems. Compliance with industry standards helps ensure systems remain open and future-proofed. Tail-f Systems is a leading contributor to industry standards organizations including IETF (NETCONF and Tail-f Systems’ Advantage: YANG), Metro Ethernet Forum, CableLabs, OpenSAF, and TMForum. 8. Scalable Performance While much of the focus on performance and scalability is on the data plane around measures of data throughput and latency, carrier-grade network management applications must also have the capability to monitor, provision, and configure very large networks without impacting service delivery. This requires storing large numbers of configuration parameters as well as a transaction engine that can scale to tens of thousands of operations per minute. In addition, configuration management systems should be able to operate without any dependency on the hardware configuration. Tail-f Systems’ ConfD supports symmetric multicore processing and its embedded database is optimized to Tail-f Systems’ Advantage: allow very efficient operations on binary encoded XML data structures. The built-in database can also store both configuration and operational data and be used in systems consisting of a single node or several nodes in a cluster. 9. Security and Logging With a high incidence of severe threats and attacks on information assets, security has become a priority at the highest levels inside all organizations. In addition to mitigating threats to mission-critical network systems, network operators and enterprises must also comply with a wide range of regulations that require them to implement and verify the effectiveness of security information management controls. Tail-f Systems © 2011 Page 3 of 5
- 4. Tail-f Systems Whitepaper Tail-f Systems’ ConfD software supports full AAA (authentication, authorization and accounting) services Tail-f Systems’ Advantage: needed for robust security and can interface with an external provider such as the Linux Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) framework, Radius, Diameter, TACACS+ or LDAP servers. SSH and HTTPS are supported to provide secure remote access to the management interfaces. Role-based Access Control allows developers to build systems that meet the needs of organizations where administrators have different levels and scopes of responsibility. The audit trailing function within ConfD can be configured to log everything that operators are doing on the management system and trace back to specific changes made by an individual user at a specific time. Audit trailing is critical for reporting, meeting compliance requirements, and security forensics. 10. Reducing Sustaining Engineering Costs Maintaining and enhancing existing products consumes significant engineering resources. Feature changes both drive engineering costs for the device management team and the EMS/NMS developers. Key management interfaces are auto-rendered from a single data model and all management interfaces share Tail-f Systems’ Advantage: one set of common instrumentation functions, thereby avoiding tedious recoding efforts required by legacy stovepipe architectures. NCS includes a device simulator that allows developers to code and test EMS features without access to large network test beds. This capability saves costs, removes logistical issues, like importing hardware to India, and most importantly, saves considerable calendar time as the EMS team does not have wait for code from the team coding the on-device management. Summary Industry imperatives, like accelerating time to market and reducing cost, were the impetus behind ATCA. Achieving these same goals also requires new approaches to the development of network management applications. Building modern network management platforms is a complex and demanding process. All engineering organizations strive to develop new products in less time and with fewer resources. If these goals are to be achieved, productivity improvements must be applied to the development of management platforms, if for no other reason than the fact that management applications are always on the critical path for production release. Furthermore, service providers are pushing new requirements for management platforms provided by network equipment providers. Support for transaction management, for example, is needed to ensure complex services are accurately and consistently provisioned without configuration errors that can cause service outages. Tail-f Systems addresses these requirements with a true model-driven development approach that enables developers of ATCA-based systems to bring new advanced, standards-compliant network management applications to market faster and with less risk. About Tail-f Systems Tail-f Systems is the leading provider of configuration management software for networking equipment and network management systems. Six of the ten largest global networking equipment providers are Tail-f Systems’ customers. Users of Tail-f Systems’ products, ConfD and NCS, benefit from bringing their products to market in less time and with reduced risk while incorporating advanced capabilities and support for industry standards. ConfD is the leading solution for building on-device management systems for all kinds of networking equipment. NCS is a powerful automated service provisioning and configuration management application that can be Tail-f Systems © 2011 Page 4 of 5
- 5. Tail-f Systems Whitepaper integrated into an existing EMS/NMS platform or used as a model-driven solution to build new management systems from scratch. Tail-f Systems is a leading contributor to industry standards organizations including IETF (NETCONF and YANG), Metro Ethernet Forum, CableLabs, OpenSAF, and TMForum. Tail-f Systems is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. For more information on the company, please visit www.tail-f.com. Tail-f Systems © 2011 Page 5 of 5