Comtech EF Data VMS v3.12.x Vipersat - Manual (Page 499)

Appendix F - Northbound Interface F-1
A
P P E N D I X
N
ORTHBOUND
I
NTERFACE
General
The VMS SNMP module Northbound Interface (NBI) available in version 3.10
or greater provides two services to external network management systems. First,
it allows an external NMS to query the VMS for certain operational status.
Second, it can operate as a proxy to Comtech EF Data networking hardware,
and fulfill certain requests with information collected via CEFD's proprietary
management protocol, thus minimizing satellite bandwidth utilization for
common queries.
Typically, all SNMP GET requests to a Remote are handled directly from the
modem’s built-in SNMP v1/v2c agent through satellite communication links.
To support statistical reporting and control, these messages travel over each
established link, sharing a small portion of the end user’s bandwidth. Even
though the total amount of link capacity per Remote is typically low, the aggre-
gate bandwidth on both the outbound and all of the return links could potentially
occupy much larger percentages, infringing on Service Level Agreement
contracts. Considering the high cost of satellite space segments, which represent
a large portion of the end customer’s SLA, SNMP's requirement for bi-direc-
tional and Basic Encoding Rule (BER) formatted message exchange has at least
one disadvantage: inefficient bandwidth resource usage which, as previously
stated, is multiplied by the number of Remotes.