Category: (1) TAM Application Type
Application Identifier: 7.4
Maturity Level: 4
Resource Domain Management is the application area
that provides the exposed
resource services that are available to all other
application areas, including
those others in the Resource Management layer.
Domain Management’s role in Next Generation Network re-engineering is to
hide
the idiosyncrasies and shortcomings of the Network, IT Computing, and
IT
applications equipment from the rest of the OSS estate, freeing it to be
agile.
This is particularly important as operators install
lots of new, untried
equipment with early release Element Management
software.
Resource Domain Managers should be expert activators, alarm
handlers, and
billing mediators for their domain, but should not operate in
any cross-domain
capacity. It is the responsibility of the other Resource
Management layer
applications to perform any cross-domain functions such as
forecasting, capacity
planning and design, and or for co-coordinating
activation, root cause analysis
and performance monitoring.
The basic model is shown below and is related to the
examples shown in
section 4.2 TMF 516.
Relationship of Resource Domain Management to other
Application Map application
areas
Why Domain Management?
Domains are defined as a set of entities, in this
case resources, which have
a common set of policies applied to them by a
manager (M. Sloman, "Policy Driven
Management for Distributed Systems," J.
Net. Sys. Mgmt., vol. 2, no. 4,
1994, pp. 333–60). Note that the general
concept of a Domain allows for
overlapping Domains, provided there are no
policy conflicts. However it is
likely that the Application Map will need to
mandate non-overlapping Resource Domains.
The resources that need to be
managed include: IT computing, IT application,
and networks.
Historically Networks have been managed as a service
technology specific
stove pipe such as SDH and ATM i.e. the service
providers have commonly imposed
a policy that all SDH services will be
managed by one management systems stack.
In next generation networks there
is a need to move away from stovepipe E2E
service management stacks towards
a shared resource infrastructure model for
services.
TMF 516 SoIP Resource Management
Business Agreement suggests that
NGN will need to introduce a set of
patterns for managing resources. It
identified in section 2.6 three
dimensions for patterns namely, Protocol,
Functional and Network and covered
the general requirements for IT computing, IT
application, networks
resources.
A specific example in TMF516 for Networks was the
proposal to use Resource
Management Domains that separately manage the
logical and physical aspects of:
Access Networks
Access
Nodes
Intelligence Nodes
Core Network
Gateway Nodes
Applications and
Content Servers
The basic concept is to define resource domains that expose consistent services (NGOSS Implementation Contracts) to other Application Map applications. Because Domains are based on the operator’s policies the scope of the resource information model that they expose is based on the SP’s individual policy decisions. However the basic services exposed are those necessary to support, at least, but not limited to, the other Resource Management Application Areas.
The Resource Domain Management applications are responsible for providing a completely encapsulated interface to network technology domains by:
The Resource Domain Management applications are NOT responsible for:
design (done in Resource Design/Assign)
Resource Domain Management may be replicated by Service Providers to cover any specific policies that they have for organizing resource domains e.g. e2E technologies such as SDH and ATM, Legacy PDH networks, narrow band voice networks, Application Servers containing IT Application and Content - IPTV, and Next Generation Networks where domains need to be formed based on network roles.
Domains may also be replicated to cover different vendors and different equipment types at the choice of the Service Provider.
Impact on Element Management
With Next Generation Networks there will be an evolution away from complex and expensive Element Management Systems towards Resource Domain Managers that have common features that directly connect to the network or Application Server elements themselves. This evolution is also needed to compress the number of systems in any stack to reduce complexity, increase agility and improve end to end process performance.
The use of a Resource Domain Manager means that this can happen whilst shielding all the other Application Map applications areas from these detailed implementation changes.
Relationship to mTOP/ MTNM/MTOSI
In this analysis it is assumed that that the services exposed by the Domain Managers for Networks will be based on the MTOSI Specifications. This is shown as a red vertical bar in the figure. This sets a critical SP expectation on the position of the procurement boundary for basic Resources Management Functionality (Service interfaces).
It also shows a clear relationship between the Application Map as an Application Architecture and actual conformance testable interfaces that have been developed by the TMF.
Note that MTOSI is not limited to just this boundary and may be used by other application areas in the Resource Management and Service Management layers.
Resource Domain Management for IT computing and applications will be defined in a future version.
This was created from the Frameworx 16.0 Model