Large customer network

This customer is a large enterprise company with a globally deployed network. The purpose of this installation is to manage this customer network by alerting the operations staff to major failures and to support the latest network devices and network architecture.

The following sections describe this network in greater detail and provide suggestions for a Network Manager deployment to meet the needs of this network.

Description

The architecture of the network is complex. and contains the most up to date technology. For example, the network contains MPLS core networks. The network device count ranges from 5,000 to 15,000 devices, and the complexity of the network is reflected in the fact that there are 30 or more ports per device on average. Network operations are done from a central location with operations staff constantly monitoring the core network. Network devices come from multiple vendors.

Within this environment the following example conditions apply:

  • There are typically 5 to 20 concurrently active GUI clients.
  • Polling:
    • Chassis ping polling at two to 5 minute intervals.
    • SNMP polling at 10-15 minutes.
    • SNMPv3 polling of key network devices.
    • SNMPv1 polling for real time graphing as well as storage for performance reports.
  • Other major Tivoli® products integrated with the system, other than the required Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus:
    • IBM® Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM)
    • IBM Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager (TADDM)

Network Manager deployment

Deployment choices vary depending on the size of the network. For the 5000 device network in this customer range, the choice ranges from a single-server to a two-server deployment. Key factors for success include the network response time for the targets (given that this is a county or global distribution of target devices), memory availability on the supporting servers, the polling selected and the rates of polling.
For the top end of the network (approximately 15,000 devices), a distributed, multiple domain deployment is required. In addition to the multiple-server deployment description provided elsewhere, the following deployment settings are appropriate for this type of environment.
  • Deploy two domains.
  • Deployment of a dedicated database server.
  • Each of the servers requires the following:
    • 8 processors.
    • Up to 128 GB of memory.
    • 3 disk, RAID 5 multiple disk array
  • For the systems used, deploy as follows:
    • Server 1: Network Manager with 36 GB of memory.
    • Server 2: Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus and Dashboard Application Services Hub with up to 12 GB of memory.
    • Server 3 a customer-selected RDBMS (Db2® or Oracle) with up to 84 GB of memory.
  • Systems to be deployed on Linux® or UNIX platform.
  • Db2 or Oracle RDBMS used for the NCIM database.
  • Two polling engines:
    • Use the default ncp_poller process for chassis ping.
    • Create a separate ncp_poller for the SNMP polls.
  • Client system: single processor, 4 GB of memory, supported JRE and Internet browser
  • IPv6 dual stack support is required if workstations or network devices have IPv6.