Westborough, Massachusetts-based Proteon International Inc’s new integrated network management system, Oneview, is being based on the NMC 3000 architecture produced by Guildford, Surrey-based Network Managers Ltd – a set of object-oriented toolkits designed to enable the smallest hardware manufacturer to put together its own network management system using a set of standard building blocks, plus product-specific modules objects that adapt the system to handle non-standard hardware features. What makes this noteworthy, apart from its conceptual neatness, is the interest that the company seems to have generated since a group of Retix Inc, Micom Systems Inc and Racal’s Racal Milgo US data subsidiary employees, started Network Managers in the summer of 1990. Southborough, Massachusetts-based Chipcom Corp has backed the product, as has Ascom AG, but Proteon is the company’s proudest addition to date – it has been difficult, says director of marketing Michael Emanuel, to overcome the not invented here prejudices of some US firms, and marketing departments also have emotional capital invested in their existing network management systems, making the move to using someone else’s architecture an unpopular move in some parts of the company. As with all object-oriented systems, the idea is to be able to re-use pieces of code, to avoid re-inventing the wheel. Every network management station needs a nice graphic user interface and so Network Managers has one that vendors can use to save time. Likewise, most network management stations need Simple Network Management Protocol and so that facility is already supported in a standard C++ class library. The hard work is restricted to the writing of the product-specific modules. Of course, there are other systems that aim at similar things – SunNet Manager and Hewlett-Packard Co’s HP OpenView, for example, but the Network Managers approach scores in that it provides a tighter framework within which the vendor application developers have to work. The result, according to Emanuel, is that you can load modules from various manufacturers onto the NMC 3000 and know that they are going to work, whereas the others enable you to go away and write something with large stylistic differences. He denies that this framework cramps vendors’ style, arguing that the consistency helps users get to grips with managing heterogeneous networks. In addition, it is possible to bypass the standard graphical user interface, and code directly with the Motif interface – but Emanuel does not recommend the practice since NMC is being re-written for Windows 3 and, while management applications playing by the rules will transfer successfully, those that cheat will run into some difficulties.
