‘Faultless’ network performance in demand, says Logicalis’ Kelly

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Sinead Kelly, Sales Manager, IT Express, a division of for Logicalis

15 May 2014

At any business — and our client base is no different — customers demand fast and faultless solutions. Key to the success of any business operations is the availability of automated, resilient networks, delivering optimum performance on a 24/7 basis.

Indeed, the criticality of TCP/IP networks continues to increase over time. The expanded address size in IPv6, the growth in virtualisation and the lightning-fast provisioning of virtual infrastructure are some factors contributing to this.

That’s in addition to the advent of cloud and mobile computing and the proliferation of diverse IP-based devices such as IP telephones, cameras, and RFID readers. Indeed, soon enough virtually every business activity, from gaining access to a building to making a phone call, will depend on the IP network.

In this environment, using manual processes and spreadsheets for IP address management (IPAM) is no longer adequate and leads to increased operating expenses, reduced IT flexibility, increased network outages and extended troubleshooting times.

You enable IT departments to perform to their maximum potential and businesses are now crying out for technologies which can deliver essential services for the modern network, such as resilient easy to manage, secure DNS, DHCP and IPAM.

To this end Infoblox’s solution for automation of IPAM, which reduces network operating costs and significantly enhances network availability, can allow IT departments to focus on more strategic projects to grow the business rather than spend resources on just keeping the business running.

The Infoblox family of IPAM solutions automate and simplify IP address management for a more resilient network, while yielding significant savings in labour. As well as providing increased resilience and availability when compared to a traditional solution, DNS and DHCP capabilities provide additional security capabilities that complement traditional perimeter and end-point security.

Elsewhere, features such as DHCP fingerprinting and DNS Firewall add extra security measures to the network that can’t be provided elsewhere. The benefits to such a system really are widespread. For instance, network discovery capabilities allows administrators to search for active devices on their networks and populate the IPAM database with information discovered during the process.

Network discovery capabilities enable administrators to easily add new devices to the IPAM database, resolve conflicts between the IPAM system and the actual network state, providing a single authoritative view of the network. In addition unauthorised devices on the network will be discovered.

Network automation provides IT administration teams with a tool that can simplify the management of a heterogeneous family of network devices (routers, switches and firewalls for example). It also saves historical information, provides rollback capabilities and has simple side-by-side comparisons to see what actually was added, deleted or modified.

The powerful configuration search capabilities allows you to drill down for specific parameters and quickly see which configurations meet your request. The Infoblox platform not only detects and tracks changes, it can be used to automate changes. Instead of going to devices one by one or creating custom, complex scripts, you can leverage embedded jobs and scripts to make common changes. More importantly, you can use the templates for easy customisation to create your own version and save the job for future use.

The user-based, role access controls make sure you maintain security while starting to empower more of your staff. Instead of only having your most experienced staff make changes, you can push some responsibility down where less experienced staff can do basic changes or they can request a job but need your review and approval. Each and every job can be completed on-demand, scheduled or triggered when certain aspects occur.

Network automation also provides the capability to check configurations of multi-vendor devices for compliance with internal and external policies. Embedded best practices, notification of violations, remediation options, and single-click audit reports is also possible.

Infoblox DNS Firewall is likely to gain a lot of attention, due to the additional security layer it provides. The combination of dynamic IP address management and robust delivery of DNS and DHCP services, integrated with automated network discovery and powerful network automation is a unique offer in the technology marketplace.

Other choices available to the Irish market can address part of these requirements, but the Infoblox solution provides an integrated end-to-end solution that can simplify the management of many tasks of an IT department, reduce the risk in performing those task, reduce cost and increase availability.

 

 

Sinead Kelly, Sales Manager for Logicalis’ IT Express Division.

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