[IP] Network management and control -- some history etc
Begin forwarded message:
From: Craig Partridge <craig@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: March 20, 2006 9:07:01 AM EST
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [IP] Network management and control
Hi Dave:
A brief comment on why network management is in the space it is in.
Broadly, there are three reasons:
1. We never cleanly managed the shift from a single dominant operator
(BBN,
which ran the ARPANET NCC and later the Internet/Milnet NOC) to a
set of distributed competing/cooperating entities. At an informal
level, there's considerable cooperation -- but putting together
frameworks, much less protocols, that require institutional consent
has, to date, not worked well.
2. The actual problem is hard. Managing large distributed complex
networks
is difficult (even more if different people own different parts).
That's true for data networks, cable networks, and telephony
networks.
Each community has its own version of horror stories -- problems
you'd
think should be solvable and yet defy solution at every turn.
3. Network management research has stagnated. The Internet community
established a very bright group of people c. 1987/8 to devise a
network management solution for the emerging NSFNET regional
networks.
There were three competing proposals, two of which were widely
recognized
as innovative (and the third probably was too). We picked one.
Then
almost all the talent walked away. It is viewed as a moribund
field.
You don't get tenure for doing network management research
(measurement
yes, management no). There's almost no funding. A bunch of us
who were there in 1987/8 got together recently to compare notes and
were stunned to realize that the technology we use today is almost
unchanged (both in protocols and the mindset of how to use them).
Craig
(author of one of the network management solutions that was *not* picked
in 1988 :-)).
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