Network Management Paper

Network Management Paper

David Story

NTC 411

Sept. 22, 2014

PHILIP TEELING

Network Management Paper

This paper will show the differences in both out-of-band and in-band network management along with the pros and cons of each. The term in-band and out-of-band would refer to whether if the solution would sit in the flow of data or out of the flow and analyzing some of the flow of live data. The first part of this paper will be from researching the internet about the topic and what I find. The second part of the paper will discuss the advantages, disadvantages, and differences of both.

I will start off with what I have found from researching the topic. The one research page I found was from http://www.netprefect.com/technical/in-band-and-out-of-band/ and discussed the difference between in-band and out-of-band management. “In-Band management uses the same communications channels that the devices themselves support. All networking equipment such as switches, routers, network appliances and servers can be managed in-band using SNMP protocols. In-Band devices supported include any device that supports SNMP V1 or V2c. Out-of-Band management is an alternative means of accessing remote devices when, for example, the in-band communications channel is down, thus providing an always-available, back-up management solution. In addition, some devices based on older technology cannot be managed with in-band solutions - for these devices, out-of-band management that communicates with the device directly through its console (RS232) port is the only answer.” (Cyclone Technology, 2014).

The advantage of out-of-band network management is if the network were to go down an IT person would be able to call in and still have access the devices that control the network. This would allow them the fix the connection or figure out why the connection is down and get it back up. And by calling in is that the out-of-band network device could be a switch that has a serial console port that could have a modem connected to it, or the server itself could have a modem connected to it, both of which would allow the IT person to connect to the network and see what’s going on.

The disadvantage of the out-of-band network management is that it is costly compared to in-band management. The one thing to consider is that each method has pros and cons, but obtaining a budget for the additional equipment for out-of-band management will be a struggle. You have to justify and show the need for the additional equipment by showing how it will save the company money and labor all the while keeping the network running at peak.

Now let’s take a look and talk about each of the management types and the protocols used with each. From some of the research I have done is that the protocols used for each can range from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). And with that there has been 3 versions released since its release.  MIB is a collection of managed objects, which stores information about them that can later be retrieved by the SNMP. Telnet is also one of the protocols that can be used for in-band network management but not for the out-of-band because it need an internet connection in order to use it from outside the office. This is due to it using the TCP/IP protocol which is good for the in-band management and is used in the command line window. This is an example of a telnet session command: telnet 192.168.0.22 80, the numbers are the IP address and the port for the access to the server.

In-band network monitoring versus out-of-band network monitoring will have different effects to the performance of the network. Out-of-band will be in the a device or a way of connecting to the servers or the network without affecting the performance of the network and give the network administrator a way to connect and fix any connection problems if the network goes down. The traffic flow for this would be centralized at the access point and would have no effect to the regular flow of data on the network. In-band would be set somewhere in the flow of data and allow the administrator a way to see what is affecting the bandwidth and possibly any attacks on the network. If attacks were present they could be isolated and stopped with the in-band solution and this would have to use bandwidth of the network to stop the attack.

 The performance of the network using an in-band solution would degrade some of the performance of the network because of the constant monitoring, but can be setup to just gather data and not utilize to much bandwidth of the network. The use of in-band and out-of-band solutions for a network have many differences, it would be a good practice to have both implemented on a network so that if any problems should arise, the administrator would have access to fix the problem.

Here are some examples of different devices used for both in-band and out-of-band network monitoring.