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The capabilities of these devices are expanding to not only provide traditional home internet service, IP telephony and associated computing functions, but also to introduce home services in the “app store model”. A consumer can purchase software from a service provider that could include value-added functionality such as home automation, home security, home nursing, remote meter monitoring, entertainment, gaming, or any number of other useful functions. Software application installation and configuration obviously needs to be managed on these devices in addition to the management of the devices themselves. Adding the applications and services on top of the device increases the number of objects that need to be managed. This again begs for a new paradigm in how these edge devices are managed.
OSGi and other application-enabled platform devices rely on common services and functions shared by many different applications. Making sure that these services are installed and configured correctly on hundreds of thousands or even millions of devices requires the ability to insure that large numbers of parameters are correctly configured. Monitoring the configuration against common profiles such as the “Gold Standard” becomes absolutely critical.
Today’s management systems need to not only manage the hardware edge device domain but also the applications platform middleware domain running on that device as well, and perform the following functions:
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Nakina solutions are used by three of North America’s top five service providers. |
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- Maintain a database of inventory information, configuration information, version/release information, etc. and that database needs to be redundant, fault-tolerant, highly reliable, highly available etc. to meet the service provider’s demand for high quality services to its subscribers.
- Receive, prioritize and manage alarms and alerts as well as provide historical trends and analysis for both domains (also with the same high reliability and availability described above).
- Gather performance metrics and monitor statistics for both domains, also with historical trends and analysis.
- Provision, configure and upgrade both domains in the edge device.
- Provide customer and operations security for both domains.
The edge is changing and the need for centralized management solutions is critical, especially those that promise new paradigms in management of both device and application domains, and that focus on dealing with these domains en masse, automatically configuring, continuously auditing them, managing not only the devices but their parameters and software in bulk.
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