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Integrated network and system management
Hegering H., Abeck S., Wilson S., Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1994. Type: Book (9780201593778)
Date Reviewed: Mar 1 1996

Hegering and Abeck take a comprehensive look at integrated network and system management in a readable and authoritative manner. They are clearly familiar with the state of the art in the area, both from an academic perspective and from the more pragmatic viewpoint of a network or system manager. Several of the chapters are forward-looking and speculative, giving the book a slight academic bias. Even these chapters should be interesting and easily accessible to practitioners who wish to stay on the leading edge in their field, however. The book will be particularly useful to public telephone company employees interested in gaining a better understanding of advanced network management concepts that will become increasingly important in their business as the distinction between data communications and telecommunications continues to blur.

For the authors, truly integrated network management is a powerful mechanism that is not yet fully understood, much less implemented in any usable way. Thus, the book is largely concerned with network and system management implementations and ideas that fall short of complete integration in a truly heterogeneous network and system  environment. 

The five parts of the book provide a useful structure within which the authors distribute 19 chapters worth of topics. The first part contains two introductory chapters, which briefly review the fundamentals of communications and distributed computer systems and associated management concepts. These provide an effective framework for the remainder of the book.

The second part contains seven chapters on management architectures. After establishing the requirements for integrated management, the authors spend a chapter on defining and describing four submodels they find useful in examining networks: the information model, the organization model, the communication model, and the functional model. OSI and internet views of network management are considered in the following two chapters, followed by other manufacturer-independent management architectures. While none of this material is particularly profound, it is collected and presented in a way that makes it much more accessible than the original standards documents. The final two chapters in Part 2 concern gateways between management architectures and proprietary architectures. While the focus of the book is clearly on open systems, the recognition that most of the world is still using proprietary systems provides some helpful information for those faced with the challenge of interoperating with, or moving to, more modern management architectures.

Management tools vary greatly in their degree of integration. This fact provides a structure for the discussion of isolated tools, management platforms, and integration of tools with platforms in three of the five chapters contained in Part 3. The remaining chapters in this part deal with properties and classes of management tools and development tools for creating management systems.

The last two parts of the book could have been combined into a single segment on management scenarios. The two chapters of Part 4 cover those management situations with which organizations have had the most experience: component management and system management. The first two chapters of Part 5 also deal with management scenarios, although application management and enterprise management are generally not attempted outside universities at this time. This speculative aspect unites these two chapters with the final chapter of Part 5, on research directions and future possibilities in network and system management. While this chapter is interesting, it does not adequately cover the practical business issues involved in problems that must be addressed by network and system managers in the near future.

The authors adopt a European perspective on telecommunications networks. The book is a translation and, although it is quite readable, occasional awkward grammatical constructs and punctuation remind the reader of its German origins.

Both computer and communications professionals will find this book to be a useful reference. It is also suitable as a textbook, although it contains no questions or exercises. Advanced undergraduates, beginning graduate students, and those in non-college technical programs involving network or system management will all find the book understandable, although the tone may be a bit too academic for non-college students.A final criticism of the book, from a practical perspective, is that its focus on opensystems and standards may be frustrating for practitioners dealing with problems in thefield today.

Reviewer:  Brad Stewart Review #: CR119009 (9603-0148)
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Network Management (C.2.3 ... )
 
 
Data Communications (C.2.0 ... )
 
 
Network Architecture And Design (C.2.1 )
 
 
Network Protocols (C.2.2 )
 
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