Tearing down the wall: Integrating ISO and internet Management

Today, despite protocol wars fought with the fervor and rhetoric usually reserved for politics or religion, many network management platform products support both SNMP and CMIP. Increasingly, the challenge is not to pick a single best management protocol, but rather to find some way of gluing together a diverse set of networked devices which speak a hodge-podge of standard and proprietary management protocols. In this heterogeneous environment, end-to-end management requires an integrated, unified view of the managed network, despite differences in management protocol and information structure. Integrated management can be facilitated by the development of proxy mechanisms and Management Information Base (MIB) translation procedures. Key to achieving timely, effective integrated management is to preserve and leverage from existing commercial investment in both ISO/CCITT and Internet-based management technologies through deployment of common methods and tools which support integration.