The Q3ADE Architecture

(Note! Parts of the functionality described here may be excluded by license restrictions or limitations in the supporting Operating System)

Q3ADE® 3G is a third generation Manage­ment platform, addressing the need to seamlessly integrate legacy as well as future management technologies with business applications in a common high level information framework.

The Q3ADE 3G Application consists of a Server, which may be accessed via the included graphical client tool, the Q3Browser  or via a web browser (IExplorer or Firefox).

The Server manages the access to the "Managed Equipment", which may be anything from an on/off intrusion detector to a large complex telephone switch. The Server presents the management information in the Managed Equipments as one big information tree, much like a file system, although much more versatile and feature rich.

The Q3Browser provides different graphi­cal views of this information, and enables you to access and modify the managed information interactively.

Management operations may also be provided in the form of local management scripts, which may be invoked either directly via a local/remote console interface, via a web page or by management automatics inside the Q3ADE 3G platform.

The functionality of the Q3ADE 3G Server is divided into functional components, which are interconnected through the Q3ADE Core, which provides the distributed multi-threaded transaction processing capabilities that enables Q3ADE's TMN based distributed multi-tier management architecture.

The functional components of Q3ADE 3G may be divided into the following groups:

• The Technology Gateway Componentss: Constitute the interface to different management technologies like SNMP, CMIP, CORBA, HTTP, SMTP, TL1, Telnet, SSH, RSH, FTP

• The Management Services Components: Functions constituting the basic FCAPS (Fault, Configuration, Accounting, Performance, Security) services of the platform.

• The Dynamic Application Components: Basically any other kind of application functionality, including management of specific types of equipment and the upcoming Incident Management Service.

The Technology Gateway Components

The Technology Gateway Components serve as mediators between different protocol/interface technologies:

• The CMIPGW - Enables access to other Q3ADE applications and 3'rd party TMN applications, whether Agents or Manager Platforms.

• The SNMPGW - Enables access to SNMP based equipment.

• The CORBAGW - Enables both access from CORBA client applications and to CORBA based equipment (CORBA Servers or agents).

• The CLIGW - Provides various types of communications services  like Telnet, SSH, RSH and FTP.

• The TL1GW - Provides access to TL1 based equipment.

• The HTTPGW - Provides dynamic HTTP/HTML (Web server) functionality.

• The E-mail Gateway - Provides script driven SMTP (E-mail) interfacing. Send/Receive management information via e-mail and SMS.

The Management Services Components

The Management Service Components, which performs various system management functions:

• The NMS - Network Management. Autodiscovery and recognition of equipment types, service availability monitoring, resource availability monitoring.

• The FMS - Fault Management. Alarm Management, Event Correlation.

• The CMS - Configuration Management. Drill-down maps, Autodiscovery etc.

• The AMS - Account Management. Mediating and correlating account information

• The PMS - Performance Management Functions.

• The SMS - Security Management. Single-sigon. User/Group Directory, Auditing, Information access profiling.

• The MMS - Model Management - Meta Model MIB and Project management Utilities.

The Dynamic Application Components

The Dynamic Application Components is a novel feature that enables you to add new functionality and features to your management platform on-the-fly.

Actually, by far most of new Q3ADE 3G functionality comes in the form of Dynamic Application Components, which may be downloaded from UHC's web site or potentially 3'rd party vendords and installed onto your Q3ADE 3G platform on a need basis.

The ability to load components on-the-fly is used extensively by the NMS Autodiscovery mechanism. When a new type of equipment is discovered and recognized, then the NMS will look for components matching this type of equipment and load them. In other words, the platform will automatically adapt itself to the system environment it is placed in.

Numerous new dynamic application components will be released during the coming year.