| Over the last decade, common carriers have been able to successfully deploy high-bandwidth, seamless, end-to-end services in an increasingly fragmented marketplace because of national and international consensus on open interface standards for new technologies such as ATM and SONET. However, the deployment of seamless systems to manage the new technologies has been less than successful, partly because of the inherent complexity and distributed nature of network management. Thus whilst service offerings are increasingly integrated and technology-neutral, the supporting management systems remain isolated and technology-specific. This forces common carriers to either develop their own, closed solutions to network-management integration or rely on a "rolling-chair" manual approach.;The development of integrated network-management systems for large networks cannot rely on a "one-size-fits all" standard design but calls for a combination of topographical, organisational, and technological approaches--in fact it calls for an architecture for open distributed management. We offer a taxonomy, encompassing both architectural design and architectural style, to help reason about software architectures and we place the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing--an architectural reference model developed by ISO--within that taxonomy. We use the reference model and the taxonomy to develop an architectural design framework for Open Distributed Management which directly supports the design of open, interoperable network-management systems. |
