Architecture
The NMC-RX network management system consists of several subsystems, as shown in Figure 1.
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.
SNMPv2c and SNMPv3
You can install the SNMPv2c version or the SNMPv3 version of the NMC-RX application. Each version provides authentication and privacy for users in different ways:
- SNMPv2c—Provides password protection via a community string.
- SNMPv3—Each user is associated with a group. A group is a set of users with the same access privileges to the router. For each NMC-RX user, you can configure only one SNMP user.
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.