Net/Systems Management /

FORE systems jump-starts policy management product rollout

By John Morency
Network World on Network/Systems Management, 02/08/99

Mention the words "Policy Management", "LDAP" and "Directory Enabled Networking" in the same breath to most network managers and you'll likely get a response that asks you to come back when you have something real to talk about. Indeed, Policy Management services that utilize LDAP and DEN have received a lot of architectural attention and more than their share of slideware over the past year. However, the reality is that the major vendors have delivered few supporting products. The result is that users have either chosen to implement ad-hoc policy management with one of the smaller players or have elected to ignore policy management implementation altogether.

Watch out, users, 1999 may well be the year when policy management hype may finally be overcome by product reality.

The first policy management product announcement from a major vendor recently came from FORE Systems who rolled out LDAP and DEN support as part of its Policy Based Network Management (PBNM) initiative.

FORE appears to have done a very effective job in streamlining its product support while allowing a broad range of multi-vendor directory support at the same time. Key to its implementation is the Extensible Directory Services Agent (EDSA) which is implemented in FORE's ESX-2400 and ESX-4800 Edge Switches. The EDSA is based upon a run-time only version of Windows NT that contains onboard LDAP V2 and V3 services that support Netscape's Directory Server, Novell's NDS and the upcoming release of Microsoft's Active Directory. The advantage of this approach is that the EDSA can directly import policy data from the directory server without the need for a separate proxy server.

Network management support is extended through the ForeView(R) Policy Console, a Java-based console that, like the EDSA, can directly interwork with the directory server for the storage and retrieval of policy data. It is interesting to note that the Policy Console can either run in stand-alone mode or in conjunction with the ForeView product, giving users the option to implement only what they need and not be forced into implementing unnecessary baggage.

I expect that the majority of initial applications will likely be for defining network application performance policy that will be defined either in the form of end-to-end response time, the logical equivalent of a Frame Relay Committed Information Rate (CIR) or some combination of the two. FORE's substantial experience in frame to cell mapping should finally give users an effective alternative to the implementation of a disparate set of point products for managing production service levels.

The net for users is an approach that breathes much needed reality into policy management vapor and it also offers strong promise for reducing the level of manual management required for mixed frame and ATM networks. Let's hope we see similar offerings from the other major vendors sooner rather than later.