Compute Servers - Alcatel-Lucent Security Management Server (SMS) Release 9.4 Technical Overview

Alcatel-Lucent Security Management Server (SMS)

Compute Servers

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Overview
The fact that all Brick devices send log information to the centralized SMS could
become a bottleneck for an extremely large network with thousands of Brick device or
having very high traffic. To further enhance the scalability of the Alcatel-Lucent
security solution, a set of additional servers, known as Compute Servers (CSs), expand
the logging and data collection capabilities of an SMS. The CS(s) acts as log collection
points and increases the total number of supported Bricks as well as total log traffic
that can be logged by these Bricks. Sometimes, for network efficiency reasons, it may
be desirable to deploy local / regional log collection and the CSs are an ideal solution,
providing substantial saving of WAN bandwidth used by log transmission. CSs are also
managed by the SMS.
The Primary and secondary SMSs both contain their own databases which are kept
synchronized. The CSs focus on enhancing the capabilities of SMS by providing a
large number of log collection points and do not contain any database.
The CS accesses the database on its associated SMS. The SMS and all its related CSs
are referred to as a unit called the SMS Cluster. Each SMS Cluster contains a SMS (A
Primary SMS and up to three other Secondary SMSs) and one or more CSs. The CSs
within a cluster can be geographically distributed and will communicate securely. One
SMS server can support up to five CSs. Each CS, in turn, can collect logging data
from up to 1,000 Brick devices.
The CSs obtain all of their data from the SMS database. Each Brick (or other managed
device) is configured with a list of log collection points (Note that both CSs as well as
SMSs are valid log collection points) with a preference order and will send logs to the
log collection server to which is it is currently homed. Thus, an SMS Cluster is able to
manage a larger number of Bricks as well as collect a larger volume of log data from
Brick devices.
Most of the SMS tools are also available on the CSs. Administrators will be able to log
into the Compute Servers to do most management activities including creating and
updating Bricks and Policies for the Brick devices that are associated with that CS.
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260-100-022R9.4
Issue 1, June 2009
2-9