Lowering the drawbridge: Lucent's OneVision open to all

In a plenary session at the Supercomm show in Atlanta earlier this month, Royce Holland, CEO of Allegiance Telecom, called on telecom software and equipment vendors to deliver open systems. "Whatever transport technology you use, a technology-independent platform is essential to the success of service providers today," Holland said.

Lucent Technologies' software products group will try to deliver that capability with enhancements to its OneVision suite of network management solutions.

The vendor has integrated several network management modules into an interdomain management function, which binds multivendor service management solutions with multi-technology transport protocols. The interdomain management function is the key difference in OneVision version 4.0.

"We believe you need a solid foundation for a complete management solution, so we're building a logical architecture for the future," said Richard Dominach, senior product marketing manager for Lucent's OneVision.

OneVision supports ATM, frame relay, plesiochronous digital hierarchy, Sonet and IP networks. In the future, it will include open system support for dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) and synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) transport technologies. Deutsche Telekom will use OneVision to manage its national network, which will include DWDM and SDH.

Lucent's interdomain manager uses CORBA application interfaces to communicate with these transport technologies and with the service management layer. Service management solutions include order creation and management, trouble management, billing, reporting, service level agreement management and a customer service manager.

"We needed an intelligent way to tie [the layers] together. The CORBA interfaces and the flow-through framework of the interdomain manager do that for us," Dominach said.

The interdomain management layer contains five primary OneVision solutions. The first addresses concerns raised by another competitive provider in his message to vendors at Supercomm: "We don't need to be put in configuration hell," said Robert Knowling, president and CEO of Covad Communications.

The interdomain configuration manager lets service provisioning and configuration flow from the service management layer to the network elements, which can be from multiple vendors.

The network fault management system has two components: the fault manager, which detects alarm conditions throughout the network; and the correlation manager, which helps determine the root cause of different alarms.

A dynamic network analyzer tracks usage and spare capacity to help with planning and engineering. It works with the fourth module, which is Granite Systems' Xpercom inventory management system.

The last interdomain module is the NetMinder system. Just as the interdomain manager ties the transport and network elements to the service management solutions, NetMinder links the modules within the interdomain manager.

"OneVision is focused around NetMinder," Dominach said. "It helps take [network] management from a roadblock to a competitive advantage."

The advantage for Lucent will be applying such a comprehensive solution to the broader market by supporting many systems. "We want to be tightly integrated but still remain open," Dominach said.