Interoperable Distributed Management

Being able to write distributed network management applications knowing SNMP / CMIP is noble and useful; being able to write distributed network management applications without knowing SNMP /CMIP is nobler, and no trouble. The latter might just be possible now that a family of middleware toolkits is available. These development toolkits promise to bridge the world of distributed applications such as OMG’ s (Object Management Group) CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) framework and our familiar SNMP world. CORBA is a distributed object framework in which methods can be invoked transparently across hardware/ software platforms, networks, and locations. Key components of CORBA include its Interface De® nition Language (IDL), which speci® es a component’ s boundaries and interfaces, and its Object Request Broker (ORB)±the object bus through which objects transparently make requests and receive responses from local / remote objects. This sort of automatic and transparent method invocation and object interaction forms one of the main goals of distributed computing. CORBA has been gaining momentum recently with the availability of commercial ORBs. Network management applications are distributed by nature. Thus CORBA is a powerful and useful framework for NM application development. To bridge the CORBA world with the SNMP world, the following steps are required: