Subject: Telecom Network Management

Topic: Overview of Network Management

Difficulty: High

5M , 10M

Perspectives of Network Managers:

They face network administration and management problems day in and day out. These are the folks who carry a cell phone with them all the time since most corporate networks run 24/7—i.e., available 24 hours a day 7 days a week! The questions that were posed, with a summary of the answers edited for the current slams of IT, follow.

• People expect a network to function like a telephone network.

• Reliability in a data network as in a telephone is unrealizable. The telephone network was monopolistic and had expensive redundancy. The data network is ad hoc, decentralized, has loosely specified interfaces, and has dynamic routing. Thus, it is a lot more flexible than the telephone network though less reliable.

• Designing, deploying, and managing networks that can handle real-time and non-real-time data.

• Integration of multivendor and multi technology equipment and their network management systems.

1) Top challenging activities in managing the network:

• Rapid advance of technology

• Problem analysis—needs human intuition and skill besides sophisticated management tools

• Anticipate customer demands

• Acquire and retain human resources

• Manage client–server environment in converged networks

• Networking with emerging technology necessitates the need for continuing education

• Collaborative research between academic institutions and industry

• Maintain reliability, that is, make changes, upgrades, etc. without disrupting the network and impacting business

• Diagnose problems or outages in a non-disruptive manner (without impacting other users on the network)

• Estimate the value of a technology transition

2) Elements for which managing network require most of your time:

• A 30-80% growth, 20-70% maintenance based on the organization

• Configuring the management system itself takes most of the time

• Expanding the network

• Gathering and analyzing statistics for upper management review to conduct business

3) Managing network without an NMS:

• Reactively, not proactively; firefighting

• Troubleshooting tools, e.g., sniffer, ping, etc

• Home-grown systems using an open source, e.g., Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG)

• Rely on consultant advice and technical information for growth decisions

4) Problems expected the NMS to resolve:

• Enhance customer satisfaction by meeting the Service Level Agreement (SLA)

• Save time and people resource and thus enhance productivity

• Turn-around shorter for resolution of problems

• Gather statistics and predict trends for planning purposes

• Document events, Troubleshooting

• Remove constraints and bottlenecks, Fault isolation

• Expect the NMS to do a root cause analysis and pinpoint failures

For further read refer (What are challenges faced by networks managers while managing a network?) asked in May 2015

• Management Challenges for IT Administrators:

IT administrators are responsible for the backbone of modern information technology systems which are reliant on complex network infrastructures. For medium to large-sized companies there can be literally hundreds of thousands of devices which are mission critical to company operations. The server and network devices can include many different types of hardware from a variety of vendors, security components, switches, routers, and other components that make up the infrastructure. Here are some of the challenges in terms of a manual approach to managing server and network infrastructures.

1. Configuration Tasks: When using the conventional approach to network administration IT personnel typically invests a lot of time into performing configurations which are repetitive and time consuming. This takes time away from planning for future innovations that increase productivity.

2. Network Growth: As a company expands so does the number of devices and applications. This means additional tasks in terms of configuration. IT administrators end up prioritizing according to business task importance which increases the risk of errors and network outages.

3. Network Security: The tasks associated with network security can be monumental in terms of patching, firewalls, intrusion detection monitoring, and other security measures which are used to secure data on a server. This leaves a lot of room for error which increases the risk for data breaches.

4. No Centralized Management: When you use the conventional approach to server and network management there is no centralized control for keeping track of configuration changes, updates, and other mission critical steps which are required to meet compliance regulations. Performing each management task separately is time consuming and repetitive.

5. Lack of Accountability: With most network infrastructures there is no way to ensure accountability for device configurations and user actions. If a security breach occurs or there is an unauthorized configuration change there is typically no way to trace the action back to a specific user.

6. Lack of Powerful Computing Platforms: The major challenge in growing processing power of computers has been the lack of energy and space to power supercomputers. IT managers have always been on the lookout for better and faster systems which will help in the faster processing of the large amounts of data available today.

7. Data Acquisition Problems: Firewalls which protect emails, applications and web browsing can cause important packet losses in the TCP/IP networks. This can result in important data loss and reduce the network speeds considerably, making the online collaboration impossible. Similar losses can occur due to the switches and routers which do not have the required high-speed memory.

8. Compute Management and Provisioning: One of the biggest challenges for IT managers is the humongous amounts of data that is available today. High-performance computing of these large data sets will require virtualization and automation to avoid adding more people to these processes. The major challenge for IT managers is to simplify these tasks and speed up the processing.

9. Lack of Efficient Data Storage Architectures: Cloud storage has taken over in most of the cases in the modern world. Though it is a cost-effective and scalable alternative for data storage for IT managers, it does not provide the required data storage architectures which can accommodate a variety of applications. The IT community needs something more flexible which is beyond space and cost in cloud storage options.

10. Dearth of Ways to Improve Data Analytics: Currently there are not many methods in place which can be used by IT managers to separate quality data from the humongous data sets. It is important to identify patterns in the data and correctly analyze it and use it to take business decisions in infrastructure management.