Customer equipment configuration manager for managed network service providers

Nowadays, many enterprises want to deploy Managed Network Services (MNS) so that their corporate resources are dedicated to their core businesses. Configuration management of network elements (NE) is a prerequisite of other parts of MNS, though it requires on-site personnel and is labor-intensive, so those systems that remotely and automatically manage NE configurations in behalf of MNS Providers (MNSPs)' on-site personnel can help reduce service cost. However, the existing systems for this purpose, in which a monolithic server daemon serves for the entire customer base, cannot necessarily ensure independence of the service continuity for each customer, because an unexpected halt of service to a customer can bring the entire system down with it. We offer a Customer Equipment Configuration Management System (CECM), which allows MNSPs to remotely and automatically manage configurations of thousands of NEs geographically scattered in many sites simultaneously, while ensuring the independence of the service continuity. CECM achieves this by adopting a novel Process-Per-Service (PPS) architecture, in which a set of independent system processes is exclusively used for the management of a customer's NE configurations. We also implement a prototype system to show the worst-case performance of CECM. The result shows that the configuration of 1000 emulated NEs for 100 customers can be simultaneously set within 45 seconds. While these results are preliminary, they suggest that CECM can help reduce service cost of providing MNSs.