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Frameworx Application: Resource Domain Management

Category: (1) TAM Application Type

Application Identifier: 7.4

Maturity Level: 4

Overview

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

Functionality

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:

  • hiding vendor specific idiosyncrasies e.g. for network s through the use of mTOP/MTNM/MTOSI template mechanisms.

  • presenting a standards based interfaces e.g. for networks mTOP/MTOSI/MTNM specifications using a standard data model.

  • providing in-domain activation.

  • providing in-domain alarm collection, filtering (and non data based correlation) to supplement that done by Correlation & Root Cause Analysis.

  • providing in-domain QoS activation .

  • providing in-domain inventory discovery to supplement that done by Resource Inventory Management.

  • containing limited distributed copies of logical network inventory sufficient to support atomic operation rollback, element manager selection and network auto-discovery. Domain Managers are not the masters of this data. Where keys need to be assigned (e.g. IP addresses, VLAN IDs, PortIDs, telephone numbers) this will be undertaken by other applications in the Resource Management Layer.

The Resource Domain Management applications are NOT responsible for:

  • cross-domain anything (activation, fault correlation and RCA, QoS, testing, orchestration – all done in Resource Configuration / Provisioning, Correlation & Root Cause analysis, Resource Performance Monitoring, Resource Testing Management).

  • planning (done in Resource Planning/Optimization)
  • design (done in Resource Design/Assign)

  • assignment/ allocation of anything (e.g. ports, IP addresses) (done in Resource Design/Assign)

  • managing the engineering work for physical network equipment (outside plant), fiber or copper (done in Resource Logistics and Workforce Management).

  • providing in-domain performance monitoring – this is generally conducted by specialist tools and probes in Resource Testing Management.

  • being the database of record (Network inventory database of record is in Resource Inventory Management)

  • naming network resources (done in Resource Planning/Optimization and Resource Design/Assign)

  • workflow (done in Resource Configuration / Provisioning,)

  • B2B ordering (done in the Partner/Supplier Management Applications) Replication of Resource Domains

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.

Supported Business Services

(1) TAM Application Type Resource Domain Management

Appears on these diagrams:

is a more detailed diagram for the

Frameworx Domains (Horizontal)


This was created from the Frameworx 16.0 Model


Created from the TM Forum Model Frameworx 16.0.0 on 6/13/2016 at 22:30