Web NMS : Offering Comprehensive FCAPS Functions
Role of FCAPS Applications
During the past decade, the Telecom industry has seen a significant
surge in the complexity of network infrastructures with widespread
proliferation of a new generation of network elements and services.
Applications specific processors, optical components, optical back
plane technologies and integrated system design have fueled
unprecedented capabilities in handling gigabits and terabits of
heterogeneous traffic in a single network element. Innovations like
SONET virtual concatenation has made it possible to transport
data traffic over SONET with significantly better payload utilization.
DWDM has enabled multiplication of existing capacity without
laying additional fiber. Traffic engineering innovations like MPLS
has enabled better usage of network capacity.
The raw capacity of the network infrastructure is no longer an issue.
However, to harness the underlying performance capabilities, the
operations infrastructure - OSSs, NMSs and EMSs have to evolve
and scale accordingly. The legacy OSSs will continue to operate
for the foreseeable future and are unlikely to receive significant
enhancements since OSS forklifts are too expensive and disruptive.
Majority of the innovation is likely to be pioneered from the Network
and Element management layer functions. Some of the desirable characteristics
of EMS/NMS systems are comprehensive functionality, fine-grain
customizability to specific domains, extensibility across NEs and
services, and ease of integration into service provider's infrastructures.
A complete EMS/NMS platform will support a powerful combination
of FCAPS functions, SLM, Provisioning and Topology with extensive
customization capabilities and extensibility across domains. The
resulting solution should integrate seamlessly with OSS/BSS systems,
databases, and other management applications in the OSS infrastructure.
While several management applications vendors focus on specific
functional areas like fault, PM and provisioning, integrating
best of breed solutions will likely result in serious issues -
- Lack of tight integration
- Difficult to deploy and manage (multi vendor interoperability
issues with a common set of OSSs, databases, and management applications)
- Difficult to support (need to work with multiple organizations
which may have different support infrastructures)
- Not cost effective
AdventNet Web NMSTM
Web NMS is an open standards based comprehensive EMS/NMS platform.
Its feature rich support for FCAPS functions, SLM and Provisioning
yields to a high degree of customization with minimal coding.
The graphical development environment enhances developer productivity,
while exposing the powerful functionality underneath. XML based
configuration files allow baseline customization of the feature
set without any coding. For more sophisticated customization, filters
and rules can be incorporated in the system through scripts, written
in Java or other scripting languages. Web NMS is packed with illustrative
examples for a variety of application domains. The API is available
in Java, CORBA and XML. The customizability and extensibility
features are available for the core data model, the back-end transactional
components, the front-end session components as well as for
the Java and HTML user interfaces.
The following links provide more information on FCAPS functionalities
