Infoblox introduces products that allow IP-enabled devices to share data automatically, minimizing manual effort for IT operations managers.
Infoblox wants its network infrastructure automation strategy to work well in customer environments, and that’s why the IP address management vendor is making available this week a dedicated server that will allow IP-enabled devices to share data, without extensive coding or scripting.
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“The challenge for many in IT is that when one thing changes, it could break five or six interfaces along the way and it can get pretty expensive and complex to safeguard against that,” says Rick Kagan, Infoblox executive vice president and general manager of the Orchestration Systems Business Unit.
Infoblox decided to help its customers with the constant change by developing a dedicated server for IF-MAP, or Interface to Metadata Access Points. The company is unveiling its Infoblox Orchestration Server appliance, which will take advantage of the IF-MAP protocol to help devices and systems share data and enable more streamlined automation across IP-enabled environments.
IF-MAP is an open protocol standardized and published for free by the Trusted Computing Group (TCG), and vendors such as HP, Juniper, Microsoft, McAfee and Symantec support the standard. IF-MAP provides, according to Infoblox, “a powerful, real-time publish/subscribe/search mechanism for data regarding network devices, their state and their activities.” A company such as Infoblox could put such data to use in its network infrastructure automation portfolio.
“The company is moving more quickly toward this strategy and we really this network infrastructure automation as the ‘Holy Grail’ for us going forward,” says Steve Nye, Infoblox’s new executive vice president of product strategy and corporate development. “We will provide IT managers with the visibility and control they need in real time.”
According to the TCG Web site, the IF-MAP protocol can provide a slew of security benefits to an organization, but also has its use in the management realm. For instance, among the benefits listed for the IF-MAP standard are the fact that it offers “simpler, more intuitive policies based on user identity and role instead of IP address.
The TCG also noted that it provides “more comprehensible incident reports from sensors since they can include user identity and easier integration of data from multiple vendors and devices into a security event management (SEM) and other logging and reporting systems.”
Available now, the Infoblox Orchestration Server is priced starting at $5,495.
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