A general building block for distributed system management

Abstract

This paper proposes a general building block for distributed systems. This building block is referred to as a generic distributed system entity (GDE). The purpose of the GDE is to create a generic entity which can be used in the development of distributed systems. The GDE provides support services to objects to facilitate the creation of distributed systems. The paper stresses aspects of the GDE model that supports the requirements for managing distributed systems. by focusing on the requirements of relationships, policies and management domains. It does, however, also address other, general support services required by managed objects (MOs). The paper develops the GDE concept in the network management (NM) environment and extends it to the area of open distributed processing (ODP).