infoTECH Feature

April 27, 2009

Network Management in the Service Provider World � Part 10

 This is a multipart series on how providers are rising to meet the challenge posed by the Next Generation Network (NGN) via advanced management products and services. Unlike the circuit-switched PSTN of old, the new packet-based NGN consists of a multitude of converged services, multimedia and other forms of digital traffic. As traffic monitoring and control become more automatic, attention shifts from the network infrastructure exclusively to maintaining a high quality of service for customers and their Service Level Agreements (SLAs) via performance assurance, traffic prioritization, bandwidth shaping, and related technologies.
 
Tail-f Systems
 
Tail-f Systems (www.tail-f.com), a venture-funded company headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, develops on-device configuration management software for network equipment vendors. Tail-f’s technology reduces their time-to-market and they benefit from carrier-grade implementations of NETCONF, CLI, Web, and SNMP interfaces.
 
Tail-f Systems got its name from the Unix command “tail -f.” This command, used for monitoring logfiles, was one of the earliest forms of network management.
 
Carl recently shared some insights regarding the automation benefits and applications of the IETF’s NETCONF protocol (RFC 4741) as compared to SNMP, SOAP and other approaches regarding configuration management, including: First, the NETCONF protocol defines a programmatic interface enabling management applications to automate the configuration of network elements; second, transaction management, validations and rollback are powerful configuration management functions built into NETCONF (transaction management combines multiple configuration changes into a single atomic transaction). By assuring that all changes are made consistently before they are finally committed, network operators avoid misconfiguration errors that often lead to network outages. Both carrier and enterprise networks benefit from NETCONF as a mechanism to resiliently provision complex networks while reducing operating costs. In addition to providing mechanisms to install, manipulate, and delete the configuration of network devices, NETCONF can also do some monitoring functions. It uses an Extensible Markup Language (XML) based data encoding for the configuration data as well as the protocol messages. The NETCONF protocol operations run on top of a simple Remote Procedure Call (RPC) layer, which is turn realized on top of the transport protocol.
 
Carl Moberg, COO of Tail-f Systems, says, “We’re a relatively small software house situated in Stockholm. We have all of our R&D/programming resources located locally as well as our executive team and sales VP. We also have a North American sales force. We sell many products in Silicon Valley, the Boston area to the Tier-1s in Europe and also those based in Israel. Like many Swedish technical companies, we have a background involving Ericsson (News - Alert). Many of our people started out in their R&D lab. Others including myself, started out on the operator side. A few years ago, in late 2005, several lead programmers had worked at Nortel and were part of an acquisition by Nortel, Alteon WebSystems. These guys had concentrated fairly well on device configuration management systems. They wrote a number of the generations of the SNMP and other stacks for particular Nortel products. After a few rounds of that, they sat down and asked themselves whether it would make sense to create an off-the-shelf solution. That’s the premise of how Tail-f Systems started up.”
 
“We have implemented a fairly complete home device,” says Moberg. “This is important, since most people think about the management side or the visualization layer, when we talk about network management. Our main product resides on the device on the embedded side, on the routers and switches or on the application servers, if you like. It keeps the configuration in a database, provides a transaction-oriented backlane for configuration changes, and provide the necessary Northbound interfaces going out from the network elements, and all of the interfaces required or expected by operators today including SNMP, and CLI – which looks a lot like the Cisco (News - Alert) CLI, which appears to be more or less the ‘religious’ industry standard of today. We also have a Juniper-like CLI for those who are more data model-driven and we have a NETCONF implementation which I’ll cover in more detail in a moment. We also have an AJAX-based Web UI required for certain types of network applications and their customers.”
 
“Our main customers are traditional router and switch vendors,” says Moberg. “These days they generally have particular product lines in that there are application-specific routers and switches. We talked to many of these customers and basically many of them are tired or wary of rewriting the OAM [Operation and Maintenance] part of a networked application, and they’re happy to discuss with people like us about whether to source-in that part of the architecture. Based on our background, we obviously have some aspects of our products that make them more successful than an in-house implementation. Our selling points have a lot to do with the fact that it’s pretty hard to write home device configuration management, especially if it’s for a feature-rich product, and especially if you like to grow the number of Northbound interfaces. Over the life cycle of a particular existing product line you may want to add things such as a web UI and if you want to have stuff like transaction management in the CLI and configuration management on the box as a whole, we can help customers with that. The traction with the customers took off a bit quicker than we thought it would. We now have on the order of 25 projects that we’re working with or have sold, if you like, involving roughly 20 customers. We did sell on several occasions times to particular Tier-1s in Taiwan. We’re a Swedish company, so for ‘health reasons’ we need to sell to Ericsson.”
 
“We think we’re in a more exciting part of the sector than we first thought,” says Moberg. “It appears that the operators, just since 2006, are waking up to the fact that they need to put pretty strong requirements on their sourcing-in of network equipment. So what we find, particularly for smaller players, is that they may do well in lab tests. They may do well in field trials, but eventually they will end up in front of an operations manager at, say, Verizon, and he or she will have requirements that may not have surfaced before, when the operator could focus on the differentiating features of the box or of the application itself. That’s where we come and can help with an off-the-shelf implementation of what we know is the minimal set required by the operators themselves. So we’ve achieved a lot of traction much quicker than we thought, and there’s a couple of exciting things happening in this arena. We recently recruited an executive of British Telecom to join our advisory board. We’ve worked with operators too by talking to them about forward-looking ideas or requirements that they concerning equipment providers, since they want equipment providers work better and they want to reduce the integration costs for the next wave of technology, and avoid the extreme integration costs that I think operators have experienced, particularly regarding 3G and IMS in particular, but also for things such as whatever VPN services they have, be it MPLS or Ethernet-based. So we’re in exciting times and our equipment provider customers generally feel that what we do is non-differentiating in terms of actually winning a deal, but very differentiating in terms of surviving through the actual implementation and the operations space.”
 
“Then, of course, there’s addition of NETCONF, which is a fairly exciting coming out of the IETF,” says Moberg. “I think there’s a lot of additional and more forward-looking features to anticipate in terms of how to deploy and provision services in networks. That’s what we’re trying to do and that’s what we’re focusing on. Our customers’ applications have quite a range. We have customers such as Nortel that, despite the fact that they are struggling financially, they are still working very hard on their LTE (News - Alert) technology. We’re working with IP storage vendors. It turns out that the IP storage niche has the same issues in terms of configuration management as traditional switch vendors. We see also see a lot of traction in the video transport and video transcoding industry. We believe that customers such as Sonus Networks (News - Alert) will have continued success with their SS7 gateways and things like that. So we deal with a fairly decent span of applications used by our customers. They all end up in some way, shape or form deploying their wares in IP carrier networks, be they traditional IP, or other types of application service provider networks.”
 
Richard Grigonis is Executive Editor of TMC’s (News - Alert) IP Communications Group. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
 

Richard Grigonis is Executive Editor of TMC�s IP Communications Group. To read more of Richard’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Tim Gray
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