High Availability for Network Management Applications

  • Authors:
  • S. Prabhu;R. Venkat

  • Affiliations:
  • Cisco Systems, Inc.;Cisco Systems, Inc.

  • Venue:
  • ARES '07 Proceedings of the The Second International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

While hardware failures may cripple a network, network service providers are increasingly finding that software or its configuration is greater source of risk."In the 21st century, it won't matter who has the best 1 hardware, but the best software. That's how the defects per rnillionjigures are going to come down."-AT&T's Chief Technology Oflcer, as quoted in Telephony MagazineIn today's world of ubiquitous computing there is an everlasting need for interconnecting devices. The continuously growing internet has accelerated this need at a pace like never before. This has resulted in a lot of investment in networking infrastructure such as routers, switches, hubs and the like. This ever-growing infrastnccture needs to be manageable in a cost effective manner so as to derive the maximum benefir out of it. For the sake of simplicity we will stick to the traditional definition of management to mean FCAPS. The aim of this paper is to highlight some of the technical challenges in achievrng High Availability (HA) at the application layer 4 4 - L7). While the entire paper is about HA for network management applications the principles and guidelines apply equally well for other enterprise applications also. Also as there is a signficant industry momentum in the direction of adopting Java and its related technologies as the plagorm of choice for building manageability solutions, the scope of this paper is restncted to exploring availability considerations for such applications.