Design of the DECmcc Management Director

1 Abstract The DECmcc product family represents a significant achievement in the development of enterprise management capabilities. DECmcc embodies the director portion of Digital's Enterprise Management Architecture (EMA) and is both a platform for the development of new management capabilities and a vehicle for aiding customers to manage their computing and communications environments. Initially, the DECmcc director was intended to facilitate sophisticated management of evolving networks. In addition to network management, DECmcc has been adapted to the needs of system, applications, data, environment, and telecommunications management. The first implementations contained the DECmcc kernel, a developer's toolkit, and various management modules. Development of the DECmcc director has been a multiyear effort involving many groups within Digital. When the DECmcc design was initiated in 1987, there was no equivalent management software in the industry. Most companies, Digital included, provided one or more independent, focused products. Each of these dealt with managing a specific set of components such as a single vendor's local area network (LAN) bridges or providing a specific management application such as equipment inventory. Digital's network management capabilities within DECnet Phase IV were reaching their limit, and the incorporation of newer communications technologies in a seamless way was becoming increasingly difficult. As part of the DECnet Phase V development, work was started to rationalize management of distributed systems. This effort led to the formal definition of such concepts as the director/entity relationship, the Entity Model, and the common management information protocol (CMIP).[1,2,3,4] These ideas formed the basis for management in Phase V and were Digital's contributions to the open systems interconnection (OSI) management model from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The original vision of network management in Phase V included the concept of two management directors. The first, a sophisticated director referred to as the management control center (MCC), would handle the more complex, yet user-oriented, management tasks. The second, a simple command line director referred to as network control language, would address the needs of more experienced managers who prefer a command line environment.[5] Conceived primarily as a DECnet management director, the DECmcc product evolved to address the broader problems associated with managing a complete computing and communications environment. This evolution is not yet finished and arguably will never finish as network environments continue to