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Inter-Domain Management: Specification Translation (JIDM_ST)
Copyright © 2000 The Open Group

Introduction

Scope and Purpose

The publication by the Network Management Forum (NMF) of network-management agreements contained in OMNIPoint (see reference OMNI92) has focused industry attention on the issues of effective development of conformant network-management products. In developing the Open System Interconnection (OSI) management standards on which OMNIPoint is based, the International Organization for Standardisation (ISO) and the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (CCITT, now known as ITU-T) pioneered the specification of an object-oriented approach to modeling the resources that are to be managed.

Over the last few years the information technology industry has been rapidly developing object-oriented software development environments (languages, library tools, databases, etc.) for the realisation of object-oriented designs in computer systems. It is therefore natural for implementors of OSI management to expect to use these environments in the development of OSI-conformant network-management products. The fundamental enabling factor in realising this expectation is the compatibility of the underlying object models, so an evaluation of the OSI Management Model with those used in software development environments is required.

Such a comparison begs the question of which model the OSI Management Model should be compared against. In particular, the following have identified user needs for comparison:

With regard to OMG, comparisons to the following have been developed:

ODP
in that OMG can be placed into the scope of the ODP reference model so that standardisation efforts involving OMG can be best directed

Internet Management
in that OMG tools might be used to implement managers of embedded SNMP agents

This Object Model Comparison report sets out to compare the three object models developed by:

Internet Management is included in the comparison, but the analysis in this report concentrates on comparing OSI management and OMG CORBA.

The definitions in this document make reference to concepts defined in the ISO/CCITT ODP reference model (see references ODP96-2 and ODP96-3). This aids efforts to relate the three object models, using concepts from the ODP perspective.

The following comparison is, in itself, a necessary stage leading towards the larger objective to capitalise on the synergistic aspects of the three models, the synergistic aspects of the work that went into their respective development, and the maximum possible synergistic goals of the three groups. As will be shown, there is overwhelming agreement between OSI management and OMG models, but there are also a number of significant differences. Some are complementary and some are conflicting. Further JIDM documents are planned which will describe approaches for reconciling these differences.

The objective of this report is to provide a comparison of the three models by documenting the similarities, the complementary differences, and the conflicting differences;

Some knowledge of the OSI Management and OMG models is assumed. Readers are referred to the referenced documents SMI, CMIP and OOM for further information on the respective models.

Document Structure

The structure of this Object Model Comparison report is as follows:


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