| The rumor on how Disney uses Network Management.
When the temperature rises on
the park grounds at Disneyland
all the prices of the beverage
vending machines automatically
goes up by 10% to fully capitalize
on consumer demand. I believe
that is an old Information Technology
rumor to explain how network management
works... at least I hope it is
a rumor. Why Network Management
is important. More and more organizations
depend on their networks. Business’
the depend heavily on the status
of their networks must have network
management tools as they grow.
If a network dependent business
such as ebay, Google, Yahoo and
many others go down for even a
few minutes, they can loose literally
hundreds of thousands of dollars
in sales and even a small piece
of their customer’s confidence
which could in turn affect the
value of their stock. When every
second of network time counts
the system must be monitored continuously.
The most cost effective way to
do this is to use an automated
network management tool. Network
Management Standards The International
Organization for Standards (ISO)
addresses the five major functional
area of the Network Management
Model as performance management,
accounting management, configuration
management, fault management and
security management. Performance
Management Performance management
is monitoring, assessing, and
adjusting the available bandwidth
and network resource usage in
order make a network run more
efficiently. Performance management
is a very important part of the
network management model particularly
to the business and/or organization
that wants to streamline their
network's performance. SolarWinds
is a great tool for performance
management. Accounting Management
Accounting management monitors
and assesses the usage of data
and/or resources for the purpose
of billing. This aspect of the
network management is by Internet
Service Providers to bill customers
for the resources they use. Configuration
Management The configuration side
of network management is for tracking
the hardware and software versions
on the network to identify their
effects on the network's operation.
An example of this is Microsoft’s
System Management Server (SMS)
which has the capability to monitor,
manage and track every piece of
software and hardware on a given
network. Fault Management Fault
Management is what most people
think of when they think of network
management. The purpose of this
area of network management is
to detect, log and alert the system
administrators of problems that
might effect the systems operations.
Security Management Security Management
deals with controlling access
to resources and even alerting
the proper authorities when certain
resources are accessed. In the
same way that a network manager
can be paged or emailed when a
resource goes down, network management
systems can be used to send messages
when certain files, servers or
routers is accesses. Intrusion
detection systems such as Symantec’s
Intruder Alert have this security
management capability. There are
many products that support some
or even all of these areas of
network management. What most
network management systems have
in common is their use of protocols
such as Simple Network Management
Protocols (SNMP), SNMPv3, and
Common Management Information
Protocol (CMIP). There are a variety
of Network Management tools ranging
from Intuit's Network Management
Software to IBM's Tivoli, Fidelia's
Helix to AdventNet. Maybe your
network management solution does
not include a system that increases
vending machine prices as the
heat rises, but you can definitely
find what you need among these
and other excellent tools on the
market. References: Cisco. Network
Management Basics. Cisco.com.
Feb 2002 http://www.cisco.com/
RFC 1157. Simple Network Management
Protocol. http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1157.html
Wikipedia. Network Management.
Wikipedia.org. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_management
ITPRC. Network Management. Itprc.com
http://www.itprc.com/nms.htm Robert
Elam is a System Security Engineer
who works for the U.S. government.
You can find a more detailed version
of this and other articles at
his blog, http://elamb.org. |
