Performance and Efficiency in DistributedEnterprise Management

Abstract

This paper is motivated by the increasing need for scaleable, distributed management architectures for integrated network, system and application management within the enterprise network environment. Such integration, extension and wide area deployment of management functionality impose heavy performance requirements and produce increased management traffic. Aiming to minimize this traffic and the overall response time, we propose a distributed hierarchical caching scheme that attempts to take advantage of the diverse consistency requirements of management applications. We define coherency conditions and update policies, identify the appropriate interaction semantics, and discuss an SNMP-based implementation. In order to evaluate the proposed model and to quantify the expected performance gains we construct a simple queuing model that provides analytical results on the improvement of response time and the reduction of management traffic. Finally, the analysis of experimental results provides some insight on performance improvement for specific classes of managed objects.