Network management

About: Network management is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 17859 publications have been published within this topic receiving 234520 citations. The topic is also known as: computer network management & NM.

Self configuring network management system

Abstract: Systems, software, and methods for managing networks of connected electronic devices are described. In one example, network management policy and network management applications are downloaded automatically upon detection and identification of a new device on the network. In another example, information related to at least one aspect of the network is obtained by a network management device, and at least one applicable management policy is identified by the device; and the identified policy is used to manage at least one aspect of the network's operation.

Method and apparatus providing a graphical user interface for representing and navigating hierarchical networks

Abstract: A method and apparatus are provided which present hierarchical data to a user via a graphical user interface. A preferred embodiment represents hierarchical data related to a computer network and is provided to a user as part of a network management software application. In the interface, hierarchical data is represented by nodes, beginning with one or more top nodes and extending into lower hierarchical levels by the display of child nodes, child's child nodes, and so forth. The arrangement of nodes on the graphical user interface is such that scaling portrays the various hierarchical levels, and nodes do not spatially interfere with one another. Navigation through the hierarchical data is provided by allowing the user to select any visible node, at which point a zoom-in or zoom-out view to the selected node as a centrally located node on the interface is performed. Child nodes at lower hierarchical levels that were not visible before selection are then made visible up to a predetermined number of levels within the hierarchy. A map is provided on the interface which allows a user to graphically comprehend the present location of all nodes displayed on the interface in relation to their position within the overall hierarchy. As applied to network management, the interface allows errors in low level devices within a network to be visually propagated up to the upper levels of the hierarchy, for display to a user viewing only the top levels. The interface and computing system configured according to the invention overcomes problems of prior art systems which obscure a user location within a large hierarchy and the invention overcomes significant navigation problems of prior art systems.

Applying NOX to the Datacenter.

Abstract: Internet datacenters offer unprecedented computing power for a new generation of data-intensive computational tasks. There is a rapidly growing literature on the operating and distributed systems issues raised by these datacenters, but only recently have researchers turned their attention to the datacenter’s unique set of networking challenges. In contrast to enterprise networks, which usually grow organically over time, datacenter networks are carefully and coherently architected, so they provide an isolated setting in which new networking designs can be explored and deployed. The combination of interesting intellectual challenges and lowered deployment barriers makes datacenters a rich arena for network research and innovation, as evinced by the recent flurry of research papers on datacenter networks. Of particular interest are the network designs proposed in [1, 5, 6, 9], which vary along many design dimensions but are all specifically tailored to the datacenter environment. In the more general networking literature, in 2004 the 4D project [4] initiated a renaissance in the network management literature by advocating a logically centralized view of the network. The goal of this approach was to provide a general management plane, not specialized to a particular context (such as the datacenter). A recent development in this vein is the NOX network operating system [7]. NOX gives logically centralized access to high-level network abstractions such as users, topology, and services, and exerts control over the network by installing flow entries in switch forwarding tables. By providing programmatic access (through Python or C++) to network observation and control primitives, NOX serves as a flexible and scalable platform for building advanced network management functionality. Enterprise network management systems built on NOX have been in production use for over a year, and an early version of NOX is freely available under the GPL license at www.noxrepo.org. This philosophical question behind this paper is whether the general-purpose approach in networking, which has served the Internet and enterprise so well, can be extended to specialized environments like the datacenter, or if special-case solutions will prevail. The more practical instantiation of this question is: How well does a general-purpose management system, like NOX, cope with the highly specific and stringent requirements of the datacenter? As we explain in this paper, we find that not only can NOX provide reasonable management of datacenter environments, it also offers operators a choice of several points in the datacenter design spectrum, rather than locking them into one specific solution. Due to our familiarity with it, we use NOX throughout the paper as a concrete instance of a general network platform. However, the goal is to explore more broadly whether a general approach can be used in place of point solutions. Hence, this discussion should apply equally well to similar systems such as 4D [4], or Maestro [2]. We also don’t make the claim that these systems are better than any of these point solutions. Our only goal is to demonstrate that there is still hope for the “generalpurpose” philosophy that has served networking so well. In the rest of the paper, we first present background material on datacenter networks and NOX (§2), and then demonstrate NOX’s flexibility by describing implementations of existing architectures that can scale to a hundred thousand servers and millions of VMs (§3). We subsequently discuss how NOX provides basic datacenter functionality (§4) and several additional capabilities (§5). We end with a general discussion (§6).

Network packet switch using shared memory for repeating and bridging packets at media rate

Abstract: A hub circuit with an integrated bridge circuit carried out in software including a switch for bypassing the bridge process such that the two bridged networks effectively become one network. An in-band management process in software is disclosed which receives and executes network management commands received as data packets from the LANs coupled to the integrated hub/bridge. Also, hardware and software to implement an isolate mode where data packets which would ordinarily be transferred by the bridge process are not transferred except in-band management packets are transferred to the in-band management process regardless of which network from which they arrived. Also disclosed, a packet switching machine having shared high-speed memory with multiple ports, one port coupled to a plurality of LAN controller chips coupled to individual LAN segments and an Ethernet microprocessor that sets up and manages a receive buffer for storing received packets and transferring pointers thereto to a main processor. The main processor is coupled to another port of the memory and analyzes received packets for bridging to other LAN segments or forwarding to an SNMP agent. The main microprocessor and the Ethernet processor coordinate to manage the utilization of storage locations in the shared memory. Another port is coupled to an uplink interface to higher speed backbone media such as FDDI, ATM etc. Speeds up to media rate are achieved by only moving pointers to packets around in memory as opposed to the data of the packets itself. A double password security feature is also implemented in some embodiments to prevent accidental or intentional tampering with system configuration settings.