Development of Device Management for an Equipment Vendor
Calsoft Labs’s expertise in network management enables an equipment vendor to meet the technical and time-to-market goals.
Company
The client is a leading provider of unified edge networking solutions. The flagship product provides security and next generation services like VoIP from a single platform.
Challenge
The client is in a fast-moving market. There are some small and nimble players in the market who innovate very fast. There are also leading vendors who control the market with their marketing power. So the product had to be innovative and had to be delivered in a very tight timeframe.
A key marketing requirement was always-on remote management capability of the device. The device had to provide both web-based and SNMP based management capabilities.
The client’s engineering team had all the resources and capabilities to build the networking functionality, but lacked the experience and know-how to provide the device management functionality. Further, a vendor contracted for this work could not deliver as promised.
Solutions
Calsoft Labs was invited by the client under these conditions. Our engineering team had only 3 months to come up with the first version of web-based configuration manager. A team consisting of an architect, a SNMP expert and two web designers started the work in October, 2004. A web based framework was architected with GoAhead web server and a subset of required screens were defined using HTML and JavaScript with the use of AJAX technology where ever appropriate. SNMP agent for the standard MIBs was developed with NetSNMP. By the end of 3 months, the first release was ready.
Buoyed by the progress, the client came with additional requirements. Over the next 4 months, Calsoft Labs team developed
- Web based management for other device functionalities such as IDS/IPS, IPSEC VPN, Package Manager and L2 Gigabit Ethernet configuration.
- Enhanced SNMP Agent to provide statistics related information and supported Entity MIB.
- Successfully demonstrated the integration with OpenNMS.
Benefits
Calsoft Labs’s expertise in network management, element management and agent development offers many advantages to equipment vendors
- State-of-the-art management functionality on the device.
- Ability to meet time-to-market requirements.
- Lower cost of development.
- Guaranteed support.