HP OpenView TeMIP

HP TeMIP Software is a family of software products for the management of communication networks and services, addressing the needs of operators of fixed, wireless, voice, data and IP networks and value-added services.

TeMIP stands for “Telecom Management Information Platform”, and can be seen as a framework for building OSS (Operations Support Systems) Service Assurance applications, although its use is not restricted to pure Fault Management, but extends into performance monitoring, provisioning, configuration, and security management, thus covering the major aspects of FCAPS.

Most deployments make use of TeMIP as a MoM (Manager of Managers), by consolidating network information from so called "Domain Managers" (typically Network, or Element Management Systems from different network equipment manufacturers), thus providing multi-vendor and multi-technology integration across switching, transmission, optical, and IP networks; radio and broadband access networks; and value-added services.

In the role of Fault Manager, TeMIP provides centralized, correlated and filtered views of the alarms and events coming from all parts of the network, thus reducing the volume of information to be presented and processed by the human operators in the telecommunication operator’s NOC (Network Operations Centre). These functionalities address the goal of the communication service provider to reduce time to repair in the case of problems in the network, and hence to optimize the availability and quality of the services carried over the network from end to end, i.e. between the end-user’s equipment, across an access network, fixed or mobile, through a core IP network, and all the way to the value-added services domain.

The TeMIP Special Interest Group, an independent user's group of the product, is here: [http://www.vivit-worldwide.org/chapters.cfm?subsite=temip&id=108 - Your Independent HP Software Users Community]

History

HP TeMIP Software version 1 was released in the early 1990's by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) with some of the code coming from the DEC MCC product also known as Polycenter. TeMIP has known many names, and was marketed as TeMIP under Compaq. After the HP-Compaq merger, it was called HP OpenView TeMIP, but HP has now withdrawn the name OpenView from the market.Version 5 was released in 2002, and various sub-releases continued, with version 5.3 coming available in June 2006, and 5.4 a year later. Version 6.0 was released in 2007.

Technical data

HP TeMIP Software is based on an Object-oriented programming-based framework, where any physical or logical entity in the network could potentially be defined as a manageable object. This includes real equipment in the network, such as base transceiver stations, ATM switches, routers, together with their contained components, for example racks, cards, and ports, but also more abstract concepts like SDH trails, links, connections, user sessions, management domains, services, customers, applications, etc. In short, a TeMIP object is anything that would make sense to model for the purpose of representing and managing the communication service provider's environment.

TeMIP represents objects by using a class model, together with a repository of object instances. The class model describes the different types of objects that can be represented, and is a hierarchical model made up of parent classes (so called Global Classes) with children classes, which in turn have children classes, and so on. The relation between parent and children classes is typically that of containment, for example, the simple class model “Switch, Rack, Card, Port” could be used to provide a basic model for a number of common types of equipment found in a telecommunications network.

In reality, a given Global Class is very often used to represent a certain equipment type from a certain equipment vendor. In other cases, the class model is used to describe more abstract objects like end-user services, network domains (“clouds”), or the different layers in a Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) optical transport network, just to give a few examples.

Version 6.0 of the product runs on HP-UX on the Integrity platform, and on Sun Solaris (operating system), although previous versions also supported HP-UX on PA-RISC and the HP Tru64 operating system. TeMIP has a client for Microsoft Windows for User Interface views. Limited versions are available on Linux.

Standards supported include: OSS through Java,and MTOP MTNM from the [http://www.tmforum.org TeleManagement Forum] , Simple Network Management Protocol, Common Object Request Broker Architecture, Enterprise Application Integration as well as text and Common management information protocol.

Benefits and practical applications

The size of a large telecommunication network today can be counted in hundreds of thousands of network elements, and which generate millions of events per day. To cope with this type of environment, the OSS (Operations Support System) software must be extremely scalable both when it comes to object modeling capabilities, as well as real-time performance of the platform.

To address these requirements and allow for virtually unlimited scalability, TeMIP uses the concept of a peer-to-peer, distributed architecture: Any of the participating TeMIP servers can potentially run any or a set of the TeMIP modules. If the size of the network, or the load of the servers grows to a point where platform performance starts to suffer, a new server can be added in minutes and take over ownership of selected modules.

All TeMIP components offer a large set of customization options to align with the needs of various network operation center’s processes. Additionally, to extend the capabilities of the base platform, different toolkits allow for developing new modules using standardized and well documented APIs. TeMIP Toolkits are optional software products, (similar to Software Development Kits) which come with corresponding services (support, training, consulting) and documentation.

Drawbacks and inconsistencies