The Telecom industry is drifting from the legacy Device Management approach and embracing the newest trend -Services Management. Connecting with this technological change, service providers are bringing in ideas to simplify the Network Management functionalities. A recent development on this front is the implementation of NETCONF protocol for Network Management. ThinkPalm developed NETCONF interface support for the VOIP ESBC device series of one of the major players in the US telecom market. The development was done on Linux operating system with the help of open source packages OpenYuma, Redis and FUSE.

Business Need

In the present networking industry, 70% of the device configurations are performed using CLI, though it is difficult to manage each system centrally or individually. SNMP, also, is not suitable for configurations because of its various drawbacks – insecure transactions over UDP, protocol specific security instead of standard mechanisms like SSH, and the unavailability of batch commit or rollback features. The NETCONF protocol was designed to address the shortcomings of the existing practices and protocols such as CLI and SNMP. NETCONF takes care of all the existing configuration management drawbacks by providing XML based transaction over SSH. The new user interface can provide a highly secure, easy to use, XML based configuration management solution that helps reduce the time, cost and manual effort involved in network element configuration.