C²I² Press Release

1997-06-10

C²I² Systems, a Cape Town based company specialising in real-time, mission-critical, distributed systems, has developed an industry standards- based Network Management System (NMS) capable of significantly reducing the cost and effort of managing real-time LAN environments in mining, processing, manufacturing, defence and other industries where high network availability and survivability is a key requirement.

The NMS, originally developed for the defence establishment, provides centralised real-time monitoring and dynamic (re)configuration control of the entire LAN. The system additionally provides event and alarm reporting, statistical performance measurement, extensive high-level diagnostics facilities, computer-assisted trouble shooting and maintenance. It also comprehensively supports network security.

On-line functionality supported by the NMS includes :

• bringing up, enrolling and modifying network resources;
• keeping network resources operational;
• repair assistance
• fine-tuning resources and planning network expansion;
• managing the accounting of network resource utilisation; and
• protecting the network from unauthorised use.

Gerhard Kruger, C²I² Systems’s Technical Director, says: "Coming from the defence environment, the NMS brings a ‘military strength’ network management solution to the mining and industrial arena.

"Elements of this solution include guaranteed network failure detection thresholds and short Mean Time To Repair (MTTR), along with high flexibility, dependability and low cost.

"This makes the system suitable for numerous specialised applications across industry, especially where processing and/or continuous manufacturing are involved."

The NMS’s powerful man-machine interface provides graphics-based, diagrammatic visualisation of both the physical network infrastructure and logical connections. The interface has been simplified specifically to allow lower-skilled operators to take over some network monitoring and trouble-shooting tasks, thereby allowing higher skilled staff to focus on value-added activities.

The current NMS implementation is optimised for Multibus II and VxWorks, but can be tailored to run in a wide variety of real-time environments. Utilisation of the industry standard Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and SNMP Management Information Bases (MIBs) means the NMS can more easily share data about managed objects in the system with other SNMP-compliant systems.