Automating the OSI to internet management conversion through the use of an object-oriented platform

OSI provides a powerful object-oriented management model that is infinitely scalable and extensible but is only now beginning to see widespread support. The Internet model has followed a less powerful but simpler approach which has led to an already large installed base of manageable equipment. In the future, even if OSI becomes ubiquitous, the two solutions will have to coexist as the level of investment on Internet management technology is already high. A natural path for this coexistence is to provide a conversion from the Internet to the OSI model and use proxy systems that will provide an OSI view of all existing Internet-manageable resources. This paper discusses how the generation of such proxy systems can be automated through a set of well defined conversion rules and suitable object-oriented infrastructure in the form of a generic management platform. The approach followed for the proxy system is mostly stateless, with optimised cacheing for scoping of transient objects and filtering. Complex issues are highlighted.