V Conclusion and Outlook

  The paper has described an approach for the integration of CORBA with existing SNMP-based management platforms and its proof-of-concept through a prototype implementation. Our work was motivated by the increasing demand for accessing CORBA-compliant management agents while CORBA-based management platforms are still hard to find on the market. The need for such an integration has been demonstrated through a concrete scenario, namely the CORBA-based management of satellite constellations.

We have demonstrated how the major integration problems can be solved with rather small effort by

2em
• exchanging events between the CORBA objects and the platform through CORBA typed event channels,
• supplying information to the platform database, and
• using open platform services as a temporary replacement for currently specified, but not yet available CORBAservices.

The overall message is that there are products available on the market place today which allow to implement CORBA management platforms by the thoughtful combination of available components, e.g. CORBAservices and network management platforms. We have used off-the-shelf products and tied them together in order to obtain a CORBA-based integrated system and network management platform. Great care has been taken to base our work on open, standardized mechanisms and services for performing the integration. Especially the CORBA event service and the JIDM specification translation algorithm for mapping the Internet SMI to OMG IDL turned out to be particularly useful and powerful tools for building our interoperability solution.

The acquired solution permits the management of SNMP- and CORBA-compliant agents across the boundaries of the Internet and CORBA management architectures and therefore helps to preserve the large investments in the already deployed SNMP-based management platforms while presenting the opportunity of seamlessly integrating new and more powerful CORBA-compliant management agents. These advantages might encourage large network providers to deploy powerful distributed object systems and represents therefore a step towards integrated enterprise management.