Infoblox Bridges Management Gap Between Physical And Virtual Networks

Currently addressing the network infrastructure automation and control requirements of large organizations, Infoblox has set its sights on bridging the management gap between physical and virtual networks. Officially launched on Monday, Infoblox IPAM Insight, an IP address management (IPAM) product, started shipping in mid-January on the Infoblox-1102 appliance platform with pricing starting at $14,995.

Infoblox, which has over 4,500 customers, including almost half the Fortune 500, recently added a new networking appliance module that makes it easier to manage Microsoft's DNS and DHCP servers. Infoblox has been doing IPAM for some time, including limited insight into virtual machines. The company says the new solution gives a richer set of data for customers to work with, enabling the delegation of IP address management to the virtualization team, bringing a degree of automation not available before.

According to a recent Infoblox survey of over 5,000 IT professionals, while 75 percent are using virtualization to drive down costs and increase business efficiency, many of those with more than 500 virtual machines are experiencing new challenges. Virtualization is driving up complexity, says the company, with the rate of change outpacing the ability to manage the changes. Without automation and management, the complexity will run wild, says Infoblox.

IDC analyst Cindy Borovick says the number of new virtual servers deployed out-shipped the number of new physical servers last year. "This is creating a complexity crisis in the network where the number of virtual machines is exploding. As virtualization use cases mature, the network needs to become an equal partner in the datacenter migration to a virtualized IT infrastructure. It is clear that in order to further exploit the benefits of virtualization and create a true pool of compute and storage resources, virtual machine policies and service levels need to be managed in conjunction with the network administrator. Lack of visibility creates havoc for the network administrators when a problem occurs at the virtual machine level and halts an organization's ability to maintain mission critical service levels. As a result, demand for Infoblox solutions will increase ."

The key is automation, says Infoblox. For example, common tasks like IP address provisioning, DNS change, IP address reclaim and network provisioning have been reduced from hours and days manually to no more than 3 minutes automatically.An extension to the Infoblox IP Address Management solution, IPAM Insight further automates the collection and management of IP addresses and combines it with network details, says the company. The management interface provides real-time, detailed network discovery and visibility into the heterogeneous physical and virtual network elements at Layer 2 and Layer 3.

Borovick says that from a networking perspective, the paths that virtualization is taking will require innovation on the data center network. "Essential to this new data center architecture is a scalable dynamic network that enables the flexibility and efficiency of connectivity of virtualized workloads. Infoblox has put forth a solution to help customers create this scalable, flexible network in an efficient manor."

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