We have all benefited from the availability of open source and many of us have contributed to that software pool. Commercial software development exists because it is a simple business model that keeps people employed, or because a specific software development does not interest a large enough group of customers to make an open source approach viable.
For many of us, writing and supporting software is what pays the bills, but that doesn’t mean that the software has to be completely closed. There are a few companies like Nakina Systems that have taken a modular approach, which makes it possible for third parties to enhance their core offering.
Nakina has over ten years of experience managing network elements from various vendors using plug-in network adapters. Most of the adapters were developed in-house, but a number of them were developed by other vendors using Nakina’s “Adapter Developer Kit”. The ADK is built on top of the popular Eclipse SDK which is yet another example of extending a common software offering.
Nakina has eliminated the common network communication issues by including a number of network communication agents in the ADK. Adapter developers write code using a framework that translates from ssh, telnet, snmp, http, xml and rest interfaces on network elements, to common objects that populate the Oracle based data store. Once the data from the network elements is in the data store, Nakina provides a number of applications that operate on that data.
Each Nakina application is a separate web service that runs inside Oracle web-logic, which provides clustering and scalability from one to many instances of each software tier.
“Modularity based on abstraction is how we get things done.” – Liskov.
The Nakina approach provides modularity and abstraction with an extendable frame-work.
Nakina’s selection of Oracle Web-Logic in concert with Oracle databases and a flexible plug-in architecture is powering their development into newer technologies like NFV and SDN while continuing to provide the five nines of reliability that service providers world-wide demand.