Enterprise Network

Historical syllabus for the Winter 2005 enterprise network management class. Use this historical course document to orient your study of the accompanying presentations.

Enterprise network management, the management pyramid, management-system goals, and SNMP fundamentals. Establishes why growing organizations need a structured approach to monitoring and controlling networks.

SNMPv3 engines and applications, message processing, security, encryption, and access-control subsystems. Explains how a modular protocol architecture supports more flexible and secure management.

Growing traffic and management complexity, multiple management systems, operational costs, automation, and return on investment. Connects technical complexity with the business need to reduce ownership cost and improve operational efficiency.

Management skills, smarter systems and MIBs, shared data models, distributed servers, policy-based management, and directory-enabled networking. Presents architectural and organizational responses to the problems introduced in the preceding chapter.

HP OpenView as a case study, including FCAPS, MIB and MPLS support, policies, reliability, integration, and programmability. Uses an actual management platform to connect general principles with product capabilities.

Server and client components, synchronous and asynchronous network communication, database access, middleware, and presentation interfaces. Shows how the parts of a management application cooperate to collect, store, and present network information.

Building SNMP software components with management APIs, Microsoft Visual C++, and the Java Dynamic Management Kit. Connects management concepts with the practical construction of software that communicates with devices.

IETF MPLS MIBs, how their elements relate to MPLS, and their use in operational network management. Explains how managed information can represent and support an operational MPLS environment.

An integrated review of MIBs and the principal concepts connecting network management design with implementation. Revisits the central themes of the course after the foundational chapters.

Overview of the network management platform, its operation, capabilities, and technical and business benefits. Shows how a historical management product presents network information and supports operations.

Using network security scanning to identify operating-system and application vulnerabilities and potential security gaps. Illustrates how vulnerability scanning complements network monitoring and administration.

Monitoring availability, performance, utilization, service health, and root causes to support network management. Links measurements of network health with availability and operational decisions.

Historical product overview covering network status monitoring, network layout, and problem identification. Provides a historical example of a monitoring tool and the functions used to identify network problems.

Application-aware traffic classification, NBAR functionality, benefits, and hardware support. Connects recognition of application traffic with classification and quality-of-service decisions.

Phased migration to IP/MPLS, ATM interworking, service continuity, quality-of-service commitments, and operational requirements. Examines how to preserve profitable services and their service-level commitments during infrastructure change.

Drivers for QoS, historical technologies and techniques, and management considerations for IP services. Relates performance goals to the traffic requirements of applications and users.

GMPLS drivers, architecture, signaling, traffic-engineering routing, differences from MPLS, and applications. Connects MPLS concepts with a broader control framework for evolving network technologies.

Research project on differentiated services, end-to-end QoS, integrated multimedia services, network management, and testbed experiments. Uses a research testbed to explore service quality and management challenges for multimedia traffic.

Presentation by Ina Minei examining scalability in MPLS networks; assumes basic familiarity with MPLS. Focuses on growth and scale rather than a general survey of MPLS product implementations.

Joseph Ghetie’s tutorial on management architectures, service management, QoS models, service-level agreements, products, and implementation trends. Connects management models with service classes, service-level specifications, and implementation issues.

Swarup Acharya’s presentation on MPLS network tuning and traffic engineering to improve network use. Examines how traffic engineering can help make more effective use of network resources.