Operating Support Systems and Network Management
The term Operating Support Systems (OSS) is a broader scope concept that network management. One of the motivations for introducing the term is to increase focus on business services, both customer services (service offerings, tech support, pre-sales) and managing enterprise-internal functions as services.
Network Management Systems (NMS) come into the OSS framework under the area of Resource Management, along with Systems Management. Systems Management is generally concerned with managing servers and desktop machines, and increasingly with mobile clients. These are all end-systems. NMS is generally concerned with managing intermediate systems in the network, also called Network Elements (NE's). Actually, the NE's of network management also include some network-specialized servers.
[A historical digression on why NE's are sometimes end-systems and not intermediate systems. Local exchange switches, and by extension PBX's, were once transmission equipment with switching capability. As stored program control became more popular for call-processing, this was first done on proprietary computer architectures built in to the switch. Later, microprocessors made that uneconomic, and call processing shifted to embedded standard computers, often running Unix or a real-time OS. What also happened is that basic switching, at the level of individual voice lines, was separated from the call processing to support those lines. The switch became like a generic Unix server with several T1 or E1 line interfaces. The basic switching got transferred to Digital Loop Carriers, which are sometimes outdoors or in some unmanned basement somewhere, while the number of central offices could be drastically reduced as the call processing "switches" got bigger and bigger capacity. So the exchange switches became a special kind of server, an end-system not a router in IETF technology, but the Telecom world still can consider them NE's. Other kinds of network related servers, like mail servers or domain name servers, could also be considered part of the domain of NMS, at least their communication function.]
Network Management Systems (NMS) come into the OSS framework under the area of Resource Management, along with Systems Management. Systems Management is generally concerned with managing servers and desktop machines, and increasingly with mobile clients. These are all end-systems. NMS is generally concerned with managing intermediate systems in the network, also called Network Elements (NE's). Actually, the NE's of network management also include some network-specialized servers.
[A historical digression on why NE's are sometimes end-systems and not intermediate systems. Local exchange switches, and by extension PBX's, were once transmission equipment with switching capability. As stored program control became more popular for call-processing, this was first done on proprietary computer architectures built in to the switch. Later, microprocessors made that uneconomic, and call processing shifted to embedded standard computers, often running Unix or a real-time OS. What also happened is that basic switching, at the level of individual voice lines, was separated from the call processing to support those lines. The switch became like a generic Unix server with several T1 or E1 line interfaces. The basic switching got transferred to Digital Loop Carriers, which are sometimes outdoors or in some unmanned basement somewhere, while the number of central offices could be drastically reduced as the call processing "switches" got bigger and bigger capacity. So the exchange switches became a special kind of server, an end-system not a router in IETF technology, but the Telecom world still can consider them NE's. Other kinds of network related servers, like mail servers or domain name servers, could also be considered part of the domain of NMS, at least their communication function.]
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