Power to the people

Stephen M. Hardy

Editor in Chief

A cursory look at the fiber-optics community might lead you to think that the `60s had nothing on the `90s when it comes to peace, love, and togetherness. Everywhere you look, companies are working together to achieve common goals, usually in the context of a "forum." There`s the atm Forum, the High Speed Networking Forum, etc., etc. (The Fibre Channel Loop folks have a "community," but let`s not quibble over semantics.) Each of these groups aims to promote the consistent implementation of its technology of choice, either through the promulgation of "standards" or via the shared application of expertise in solving common technical challenges.

This trend toward industry-wide approaches to technology application is undoubtedly a good thing--and comes not a moment too soon for the people trying to apply these technologies to their networks. One could forgive network managers for wondering in some cases how long it`s going to take for "peace, love, and togetherness" to extend beyond such forum activities to include the nitty-gritty operation of networks in today`s environment. In other words, if these companies can work together in these forums, why can`t they get their products to work together in my network?

Make no mistake; More and more network managers face a multivendor scenario when dealing with their infrastructure, both now and in the future. In the context of this month`s "Test, Measurement, & Management" Special Report theme, one of the biggest problems that confronts managers of both local and long-distance carrier networks is the rationalization of network management in the face of these new multivendor realities. And today`s environment makes these networks more common than in the past. For example, some carriers have rapidly expanded their networks over the years using whatever equipment and technology was current and available at the time. Others have used mergers and acquisitions to expand--and that means melding disparate networks of equipment derived from several sources. Some carriers have tried to match technology with regional demand. And with the Telecom Act of 1996 calling for the regional Bell operating companies to open their networks, managers will be playing "mix and match" for some time to come.

Whatever the cause, multivendor networks can pose complicated network management problems. Traditionally, individual networks or network elements came with customized, proprietary network management tools--and the more vendors represented in the network, the greater the number of different, and frequently incompatible, network management tools users were forced to use and maintain. For example, as you`ll read in the article on page 44 that discusses the Telecommunications Management Network (tmn) standards, mci used six different network management systems for its fiber-optic transport network before the company finally turned to a single tmn-based scheme.

As the article makes clear, it`s one thing to establish standards; it`s another to get everyone to use them. And even if a standard achieves industry-wide acceptance, there frequently seems to be plenty of "wiggle room" to allow vendors to create proprietary, yet standards-compliant, architectures. For example, Synchronous Optical Network (sonet) achieved its current prominence via its promise of a single, universally accepted protocol for signal transport. Yet until recently it was difficult, if not impossible, to get sonet equipment from different vendors to communicate completely with each other.

What`s a manager to do? Raise hell, that`s what. Vendors listen to their customers. That`s why tmn is finally making a significant appearance in the marketplace--and why the sonet Interoperability Forum (there`s another one!) tackled the issue of equipment and network management compatibility. As Joshua Morris of mci put it to me, "I guess if you`re sitting in the vendors` business, they`re looking for their customers to drive that from a `this is how we want to operate our business more effectively` [perspective] and therefore there is a market for it." Thus, if managers demand interoperability, vendors will deliver. If not, network "peace, love, and togetherness" will seem as ethereal a notion as the `60s in general do today.