Open EMS

Open EMS (OES) is a Nokia Siemens Networks software platform designed to support the development of OSS network management solutions in a multi-vendor environment. OES is an attempt to establish a standard middle-ware platform allowing OSS vendors to concentrate on developing value-add applications upon it.
Introduction
Network Equipment Providers (NEPs) invest large amounts of money in providing element, network, and Operations Support Systems (OSS) management solutions for their products. O&M and the management solution were typically treated as an area of differentiation for NEPs so there was a resistance to allowing standards bodies such as the 3GPP putting overly prescriptive requirements upon them. This situation has begun to change as the realization has dawned that there is little to be profited from the management infrastructure itself and the focus ought to be on the value-add applications delivered on top of it. Open EMS is an attempt to establish a standard platform for developing these applications. NSN's aim is to jointly develop the core platform - Sun, Ericsson, and Cisco are involved at various levels - and to foster an ecosystem of partners to develop applications for it.
Architecture
Product Platform

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Figure 1: OES Product Platform

OES is hosted on what is termed a product platform consisting of three layers: hardware, OS, and IT middleware (see Figure 1). The initial release runs exclusively on x86 and x86-64 hardware architectures. The operating system supported is Redhat Linux Enterprise (RHEL).
The IT middleware is realized by three technologies: a database, a directory naming service, and an application server. Oracle is the current solution for the database. Options exist for the directory naming service: Fedora Directory Server or OpenLDAP. The application server is IBM's JEE WebSphere_Application_Server (WAS).
OES Core Architecture
OES O&M Agent
One of the differentiating aspects of OES is its O&M agent. The agent, which is Java-based, can be embedded in managed network elements. It communicates with OES via OES specific protocols and OES is pre-bundled with the necessary mediation code to support it. This opens up the potential of significant savings when integrating network elements as it removes the need to build network element-specific mediation code. Instead, the integration effort is pushed down to the network element and involves invoking the APIs on the agent. Sample applications are provided as blueprints for how to do this.
Built-in Applications
OES has a suite of built-in applications for fault, performance and configuration management.

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