Northrop Grumman Development Project
ISS and Northrop Grumman SATCOM formed a development partnership today to design and implement a next-generation Network Monitor and Control System (NMACS) for satellite equipment for the United States Department of Defense.
The NMACS system is comprised of multiple network components, each responsible for a different monitor or control task. All monitor and control interfaces are available remotely via a web interface and use the Extensible Markup Language (XML) to transfer data. To achieve realtime updates in the web environment, a high-performance ActiveX control was written to perform transparent background communication with the server, while allowing the user to browse through the interface. The web interfaces and ActiveX control can be loaded into almost any browser, and can even run under Linux.
Each of the network components also acts as a SNMP Network Management Server (NMS) and Agent, so that the control system can be fully integrated into HP OpenView (and other) Network Management Systems.