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 SNMPv2c or SNMPv3 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 9.0, 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.