Multi-homing

The greatest ability is dependability.”
Robert “Bob” Jones.

When it comes to reliability and resiliency of your OSS, the concept of multi-homing is vital. And by multi-homing, I’m not referring to the personal habits of a recent US President.

For those who haven’t heard of the term, it is the practice of network devices sending management traffic to more than one management node. For example, you may want to send an SNMP trap to it’s managing node (ie EMS) but also to the consolidated alarm platform (ie OSS). Alternatively, you may want to send traps to a primary and a redundant EMS node to ensure no traps are overlooked in the event that one EMS node fails.

Not all network devices support multi-homing but most modern devices now do. If yours do and you have an OSS that supports high availability, take a closer look to see whether you’re able to multi-home data from network elements, EMS, NMS and other management interfaces.

The downside of multi-homing is that 1) you need to maintain additional interfaces, 2) you need to be aware of data loops that can occur when the same data appears in more than one down-stream locations and 3) it increases traffic volumes on the management network / data control network (DCN).

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