Copyright © (2002) by IEEE. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distrubuted for profit. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.
The management of network infrastructure in an enterprise is complex and daunting
affair. In an era of increasing technical complexity, it is becoming difficult to find trained
personnel that can manage the new features that are introduced into the various servers,
routers and switches. Policy based network management provides a means by which the
administration process can be simplified and automated to a large extent. In this paper,
we look at a general policy based architecture that can be used to simplify several new
technologies emerging in context of IP networks. We explain how network administration
can be simplified by defining two levels of policies, a business level and a technology
level. We discuss how the business level policies are validated and transformed into the
technology level policies, and present some algorithms that can be used to check for
policy conflicts and unreachable policies We then show how to apply this architecture to
two policy disciplines - managing performance service level agreements, and supporting
enterprise extranets using IP-sec communication.
By: Dinesh Verma
Published in: IEEE Network, volume 16, (no 2), pages 20-26 in 2002
LIMITED DISTRIBUTION NOTICE:
This Research Report is available. This report has been submitted for publication outside of IBM and will probably be copyrighted if accepted for publication. It has been issued as a Research Report for early dissemination of its contents. In view of the transfer of copyright to the outside publisher, its distribution outside of IBM prior to publication should be limited to peer communications and specific requests. After outside publication, requests should be filled only by reprints or legally obtained copies of the article (e.g., payment of royalties). I have read and understand this notice and am a member of the scientific community outside or inside of IBM seeking a single copy only.
Questions about this service can be mailed to reports@us.ibm.com .