Business-based management: NextPoint uses Web technology to manage with SLAs in mind

A new Web-based network management solution designed to cope with service level agreements will focus on providing information to manage networks based on business objectives.

NextPoint S3, unveiled at Networld+Interop '97 by NextPoint Networks, Westford, Mass., will use Web technologies to let network operators simultaneously monitor service levels while operationally managing the network.

"There's a need out there to manage networks end to end, all the way up to the application level," said Bill Maro, president and chief executive officer of NextPoint Networks. "In order to succeed, you must manage services, not service level agreements."

By using flexible logical groupings, NextPoint S3 allows the SLA parameters to be set at the device, network, application or organizational level. "Instead of just reporting what's going on with network devices, we want to show what's going on with entire services," said Bruce Sweet, vice president of engineering and product marketing at NextPoint.

NextPoint S3 consists of an infrastructure of servers and distributed intelligent agents for network management.

The system uses Java to ensure that it will work with any platform deployed in carrier networks.

The system uses simple network management protocol and remote network monitoring specification tools to extract data from legacy systems to automatically create reports on network use. The reports can be correlated with the results of real-time monitoring, and "push" technology will deliver the results of these comparisons almost instantly.

"Push technology will allow different managers to 'subscribe' to different channels of data to view the appropriate information," Maro said. Commercial release is slated for 1998.