RE: Scope of NIM

["Andrea Westerinen" <andreaw@cisco.com>]

Sorry for the delay in responding.  Comments inline, marked as <arw>.
Andrea

-----Original Message-----
From: Juergen Schoenwaelder [mailto:schoenw@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de]
Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2000 1:53 AM
To: andreaw@cisco.com
Cc: nim@ops.ietf.org
Subject: Re: Scope of NIM

Andrea> Juergen, Although I agree with "design patterns", I don't
Andrea> agree with your (3) and don't think that design patterns are
Andrea> enough.  For an existence proof of 3, take a look at the
Andrea> models of the enterprise console vendors (CA, HP, Tivoli,
Andrea> etc.).  The whole goal of these models is to pull together a
Andrea> customer's data - to span vendors and problem domains to
Andrea> manage an enterprise. <snip>

<juergen> Do you really believe an information model defined by the IETF
will
make the CAs, HPs, Tivolis converge on their data models?

<arw> Even if it doesn't, there will be mappings to it :-).  And, an info
model changes the environment from one of integrating different syntaxes to
actually doing management.  Use of a model allows the parts to fit together,
dependencies to be traced, consistent  and well-defined methods to be
invoked to cause change, etc.  BTW, my response was not to say that the
enterprise vendors should change their models - but that we have an
existence proof that OO models work for enterprise management.


Andrea> Are you saying that a customer forever must integrate their
Andrea> own data across their enterprise and IETF technology domains -
Andrea> that the experts can't work together to organize and position
Andrea> their work relative to each other?  That we can't get common
Andrea> definition of common concepts and services?  IMHO, customers
Andrea> are so excited about DEN since it offers this possibility.

<juergen> See, this is the split between what customers want and what
technology
freaks and device vendors provide. In fact, there are three key
players in the NM business:

- device vendors <snip>
- management application vendors <snip>
- customers <snip>

<juergen> Yes, people are excited about DEN because it sounds simple.
Despite
the fact that I personally believe that LDAP technically is a bad
choice (boy, this statement will make me unpopular), I have doubts
that the customer's interest in DEN will change the way device vendors
and management application vendors do their business.

<arw> Although DEN is an LDAP mapping of CIM, CIM is meant to be repository
independent.  And, given that there are CIM implementations by Sun,
Microsoft, Cisco and others - I would say that it is already changing how
vendors do business.

<juergen> Actually, I asked a few weeks ago (perhaps a bit too polemic to be
taken serious) for experience reports how other modeling activities
(such as NRIM) improved other standards, products etc. and if it was
successful, how this work was organized to be effective. <snip>
But we need to figure out what indeed the right scope is, how we can ensure
timeliness, and we need to understand which role such modeling work
can play in a larger context.

<arw> I think that a discussion on modeling activities might be easier than
a "report" :-).  Basically, the value stems from consistent semantics that
allow pieces of instrumentation from various vendors to fit together, and
that allow different problem/management domains to fit together - as they do
in the real world.  There are very few real world installations that are
actually "silos" (one problem domain, one vendor, etc.).  Problems cross
management domains - your management should also.