Category: (1) TAM Application Type
Application Identifier: 7.4
Maturity Level: 4
Resource Domain Management is the application area that provides exposed resource services that are available to all other application areas, including those others in the Resource Management layer. Resource Domain Management’s roles are to hide the idiosyncrasies/complexities of the Network and its building blocks (Infrastructure, IT computing, and IT applications equipment etc.) from the rest of the OSS/BSS estate, freeing it to be agile and make it technology and vendor neutral. Resource Domains are defined as a set of entities building the networks and its building blocks of, Infrastructure, IT computing, IT applications, equipment etc., which have a common set of policies applied to them based on for example technology, topology etc. The general concept of a Domain allows for overlapping, provided there are no policy conflicts. But in principle they should does not operate in any cross-domain capacity. It is the responsibility of the other Resource Management layer applications to perform any cross-domain functions such as forecasting, capacity planning and design, and or for co-coordinating activation, root cause analysis and performance monitoring.
The basic concept is to define resource domains that expose consistent services (NGOSS Implementation Contracts) to other Application Map applications. Because Domains are based on the operator’s policies the scope of the resource information model that they expose is based on the SP’s individual policy decisions. However the basic services exposed are those necessary to support, at least, but not limited to, the other Resource Management Application Areas.
The Resource Domain Management applications are responsible for providing a completely encapsulated interface to network technology domains by:
The Resource Domain Management applications are NOT responsible for:
design (done in Resource Design/Assign)
Resource Domain Management may be replicated by Service Providers to cover any specific policies that they have for organizing resource domains e.g. e2E technologies such as SDH and ATM, Legacy PDH networks, narrow band voice networks, Application Servers containing IT Application and Content - IPTV, and Next Generation Networks where domains need to be formed based on network roles.
Domains may also be replicated to cover different vendors and different equipment types at the choice of the Service Provider.
Impact on Element Management
With Next Generation Networks there will be an evolution away from complex and expensive Element Management Systems towards Resource Domain Managers that have common features that directly connect to the network or Application Server elements themselves. This evolution is also needed to compress the number of systems in any stack to reduce complexity, increase agility and improve end to end process performance.
The use of a Resource Domain Manager means that this can happen whilst shielding all the other Application Map applications areas from these detailed implementation changes.
Relationship to mTOP/ MTNM/MTOSI
In this analysis it is assumed that that the services exposed by the Domain Managers for Networks will be based on the MTOSI Specifications. This is shown as a red vertical bar in the figure. This sets a critical SP expectation on the position of the procurement boundary for basic Resources Management Functionality (Service interfaces).
It also shows a clear relationship between the Application Map as an Application Architecture and actual conformance testable interfaces that have been developed by the TMF.
Note that MTOSI is not limited to just this boundary and may be used by other application areas in the Resource Management and Service Management layers.
Resource Domain Management for IT computing and applications will be defined in a future version.