1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information matching system and its matching method for matching information on the state of equipment to be managed by managing equipment (hereinafter, referred to as management information) with actual state of the managed equipment in communication between terminal equipment connected via a network.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a system having a plurality of terminal equipment via a network, the plurality of terminal equipment consisting of managing equipment for managing the state of each terminal equipment and managed equipment to be managed by the managing equipment, an event notice informing the change, if a change of the state occurred in some managed equipment, is issued from the managed equipment to the managing equipment, and the management information in the managing equipment is updated, thereby performing information matching processing. A change of the state means, by way of example, occurrence of a failure, restoration, modification of various setting in the managed equipment, and detachment and attachment of a new hardware package.
When using TCP/IP(Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) as a communication protocol among terminal equipment over a network, such a TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) having a resending function is used for the communication of information requiring reliability. By the TCP, however, the communication speed is slow for the performance of the resending processing. Therefore, a use of the TCP in all the communication of information would be a great burden and inefficient. Instead, the UDP (User Datagram Protocol) having no resending function and hence enabling high speed communication is used for the above-mentioned event notice informing managing equipment that the state of managed equipment has been changed.
If the above-mentioned event notice informing managing equipment about a change of the state of managed equipment is lost on the way in communication, the management information on the managed equipment in the managing equipment is out of accord with the actual state of the managed equipment. When using the UDP as a protocol, the UDP would not resend an event notice, which is incapable of recovering the disagreement between the management information and the actual state.
In order to solve this problem, there is a method of periodically reading out information including histories about all the changes of the state of managed equipment to be managed by managing equipment, by use of the TCP having a resending function. This enables the managing equipment to obtain the lost event notice, even if losing given event notice, thereby to match the management information of the managing equipment with the actual state of the managed equipment.
However, a large amount of data communication in periodically reading out the information including histories about all the changes of the state of each managed equipment, results in increasing communication load of terminal equipment and a network.