Architecture

The NMC-RX network management system consists of several subsystems, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: NMC-RX Architecture Framework

GUI Client / Java Application

The NMC-RX Element Management System uses a Sun Microsystems Java-based architecture. The Java application provides end-user functionality for configuring and monitoring. The NMC-RX software is a GUI-driven application.

The GUI client interacts with the database through Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) and interacts with the physical devices through SNMP.

• The JDBC application program interface is an industry standard for database-independent connectivity between Java and a wide range of databases, and allows communication with the database.
• The NMC-RX Element Management System uses a robust SNMPv2c-compatible package to provide all basic SNMP functions and to allow communication with the SNMP client.

Relational Database

The NMC-RX architecture is based on an SQL-compliant Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) relational database system (RDBS) that allows several NMC-RX clients to communicate with a single centralized host. The NMC-RX application supports Sybase Adaptive Server Anywhere 7.0, an SQL-compliant database.

The ODBC/JDBC-compliant relational database is used to store information characterizing the managed devices, as well as network management-level authentication information. The database architecture provides a tight security policy, with all function calls entered and checked by the database before being issued to a device, such as an E-series router.