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Enterprise Management Bus (EMB)
Akin to the Enterprise
Service Bus (ESB), an Enterprise Management Bus (EMB)
is an open standards based software communications backbone
that interconnects computing resources, infrastructure, and
applications in an enterprise or complex system for the purpose
of integrating management. All the energy at Olocity is ultimately
targetted at working with the IT vendor and consumer community
to make the enterprise management bus a reality.
An
EMB enables the connection of systems, storage, networks, software,
and applications independent of vendor, operating system platform,
and programming language for the purpose of maximizing system availability,
reliability, and performance while simultaneously reducing resource
utilization and the cost of management. An EMB is a software messaging
architecture that streamlines the management of enterprise computing
resources or complex systems through interoperable integration.
An EMB is a key component supporting the ultimate success of Service
Oriented Architectures. The first EMB was documented in the
architecture of the SMI-S industry standard for interoperable storage
and storage network management. The SMI-S standard (originally called
Bluefin) was launched and led by Roger Reich. Shown below is the Reference Model for an EMB that illustrates key
constituents of the environment.
Roles for Constituents
A Client is the consumer of the management information in the environment
like a graphical presentation framework. The xIM architecture or
its specific product instantiations like StorageIM are examples
of clients. Olocity provides tools and services to accelerate the
construction of clients in this environment.
An Agent implements a subset of the object manager and as such
controls only one device or subsystem and is typically incapable
of providing support for complex intrinsic methods like schema traversal.
An agent may be embedded in a device (like a Fibre Channel Switch)
or provide a proxy to a device over a legacy or proprietary interconnect
(like a SCSI based array controller). A variety of tools exists
to facilitate the rapid construction of Agents – Olocity is
available to building or consult in the building of Agents in an
EMB system.
Embedding an agent directly in a device or subsystem reduces the
management overhead of a customer and eliminates the requirement
for a stand-alone host (running the proxy agent) to support the
device. Embedding an agent is advantageous in reducing management
and setup of Agents in product environments. The construction embedded
agents generally requires more effort to reduce footprint –
Olocity is experienced in developing Agents and available to build
or consult in the building of embedded agents in an EMB system.
An Object Manager serves management information from multiple devices
or underlying subsystems through providers. As such an Object Manager
is an aggregator that enables proxy access to devices/subsystems
and can perform more complex operations like schema traversals.
An object manager typically includes a standard provider interface
to which device vendors adapt legacy or proprietary product implementations.
A Provider expresses management information for a given resource
such as a storage device or subsystem exclusively to an Object Manager.
The resource can be local to the host that runs the Object Manager
on or can be remotely accessed through a distributed systems interconnect.
A Lock Manager provides a common service for use by agents and
object managers to coordinate resources between multiple non-cooperating
clients such that Isolation and Consistency for the information
in the schema is maintained.
A Directory Server provides a common service for use by clients
and agents for locating services in the management environment.
An EMB environment is described in the context of Clients and Servers
(Agents and Object Managers). However, these distinctions are only
used to facilitate the easy introduction of the EMB reference model.
The EMB architecture allows constituents (like virtualizers) in
a management environment to function as both client and server.
This capability is referred to as cascaded clients.
Contact Us: To implement an EMB and
streamline your operations.
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