conman a step towards network manageability.pdfVIP

CONMan: A Step Towards Network Manageability Hitesh Ballani Paul Francis Cornell University Cornell University Ithaca, NY Ithaca, NY hitesh@ francis@ ABSTRACT management tools seem to be waging a losing battle which Networks are hard to manage and in spite of all the so called is shown by rising management costs and network downtime. holistic management packages, things are getting worse. We A recent survey [18] showed that 80% of the IT budget in argue that the difficulty of network management can partly enterprises is devoted to maintain just the status quo - in be attributed to a fundamental flaw in the existing architec- spite of this, configuration errors account for 62% of network downtime. ture: protocols expose all their internal details and hence, the complexity of the ever-evolving data plane encumbers the We believe that the management troubles of the Internet management plane. Guided by this observation, in this paper have been aggravated by the lack of research on fundamentals. we explore an alternative approach and propose Complexity Instead, there is an increasing reliance on temporary “band- Oblivious Network Management (CONMan), a network ar- aids”. While this has allowed a number of flaws to creep into chitecture in which the management interface of data-plane the way we manage networks