- 1-From Protocol-based to Distributed Object-based Management Architectures

OSI Systems Management (OSI-SM) and Internet SNMP have been conceived as protocolbased management frameworks, adopting the manager-agent model that governs interactions between management applications assuming the manager and agent roles. The manager-agent model is objectoriented in information specification terms but addresses only "on the wire" interactions, leaving deliberately unspecified aspects relevant to the internal structure of management applications. On the other hand, OMG CORBA and similar technologies emerge from the distributed systems world and can be thought as pragmatic counterparts of Open Distributed Processing (ODP). They project an objectoriented paradigm and address mainly programmatic interface aspects, while they use a general purpose Remote Procedure Call (RPC) protocol as opposed to a specialized management protocol. The benefits of using distributed object technologies for management are easy programmabilit y, multiple programming language bindings, application portabilit y and distribution. On the contrary, management protocol approaches offer optimized mechanisms for accessing management information, including event dissemination, and do not constrain implementations. This paper examines the basic characteristics of the two types of architectures, explains their relevant similarities and differences and proposes a future architecture based on distributed objects. This retains the operational paradigm of OSISM model over the relevant distributed object framework, bridging the two worlds and maintaining the best aspects of both. The proposed framework has been prototyped over OMG CORBA and management applications based on it have been used in real field trials.