By Bob Emmerson, TMC European Editor
The wisdom of Infoblox’s recent acquisition of Netcordia was spelt out today with the company’s launch of NetMRI 4.3 – a product that integrates Infoblox’s (News - Alert) Grid based IP Address Management (IPAM) technology with its recently acquired network change and configuration (NCCM) capabilities. The combination of IPAM and NCCM provides automation, visibility and control over the costly and time-consuming manual IT procedures. This is said to result in increased business uptime, reduced cost and new levels of efficiency considered to be essential for virtualized environments.
Lack of automation is becoming a major barrier to network expansion and the broad adoption of initiatives like virtualization and cloud computing. Before virtualization, networks remained fairly static. As virtualization is adopted, automating network changes will be the only way to keep pace with requirements such as VLAN configurations, ACLs and firewall settings. This is compounded by the explosion of IP addresses, significantly increasing the need for detailed information and visibility of the physical and virtual environments.
“There is little if any hope for manual processes to keep pace with the rate of change introduced by server virtualization and cloud services – the only reasonable answer is automation” commented Jim Frey of Enterprise Management Associates in a recent report. “Network managers could benefit greatly from tighter automation and control around IP address management as an essential aspect of maintaining a highly functional, highly performing network.”
Dirk Marichal, VP EMEA explains: “The combination of Infoblox’s proven real-time distributed network data management technology – already in use by more than 4,500 customers and 200 of the Global 500 – with the innovative configuration, analysis and discovery capabilities provided by NetMRI will address mounting enterprise needs to dramatically increase the visibility and control required to handle the ever-increasing size and complexity of today’s networks.”