Position paper 
NMRG/EMANICS Meeting 19-20 October 2006, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Jean Theunissen
Manager Application Development, Tiscali Netherlands BV

Tiscali Netherlands plays an ISP role and a Telco role. As telecom
operator we have to provision network elements and end-user services
in the DSL broadband access network and on our VoIP platform. My
department is responsible for the full network administration holding
all the network configuration and managing the provisioning. Almost
all of the Tiscali network and service provisioning is self-built.

Below we describe the three aspects concerning network provisioning
that are most important to us.

1) Self-built

A) To survive in a competitive market, you have to beat competition on
   cost price, quality, or both. It is very hard to do this with
   bought components (competition can buy them as well).

B) Existing components for network management have big shortcomings:
   - they are costly
   - they use proprietary methods, making them vendor and system specific
   - they do not offer standardized API's allowing us to integrate all
     components within our systems.
   - they miss functionality

These two aspects have lead us to building the complete network
configuration and provisioning ourselves.  We are convinced that this
is the only strategy for highly competitive operators and management
tools should support this fully.

2) Webservice based

All management of network elements should be done via xML and SOAP
based Webservices. These webservices should be based on the appliance
itself, not on a related network management system. Let the element
itself publish the WSDL to describe all physical and logical objects
and options. xML allows hierarchical and flexible description of the
full configuration, including all parameters.

The element based webservices should support:
- downloading the complete configuration of the element
- uploading and activating/replacing the complete configuration of the element
- getting all the individual operational parameters and measurement values
- setting all the individual operational parameters and values
- presenting the complete configuration of the element to operators in
  a comprehensible format

It would be very useful if the xML for management network elements was
standardized and all vendors conformed to the standard and offered
this webservices interface.

3) Impact of centralization/scale

There is un ongoing tendency to centralize services. More and more
end-user services are terminated and managed on one appliance. This
causes performance issues. Part of these can be solved by the flexible
way of provisioning as described under 2). But will this suffice? An
outage caused by a full reconfig or reload should be short
(minutes). Provisioning large number of services should not affect the
performance of the live systems.