Social networks become network management interface
Several network vendors have built network management applications for popular smartphones and tablets. Enterasys Networks is one such vendor, but it also went a step further recently when it announced Project Isaac, which integrates its NMS with your favorite social media interfaces.
The company last week said it’s enabling routers, switches and Wi-Fi equipment to join social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Salesforce.com Chatter. An IT administrator “follows” the devices, which can then communicate their status and receive commands back from the admin in any of the 70 to 80 worldwide languages that the social networks support.
BACKGROUND: Enterasys wants you to friend and tweet with your switches and routers
This will work in lieu of a command line interface (CLI) and removes the need to run a specific client NMS application on administrator devices, Enterasys said. So machines will speak the language of humans instead of humans adapting to machine language, which might be better suited to 20-something network administrators.
For example, administrators could set certain thresholds on Wi-Fi APs. If an AP approaches the threshold, it can send a tweet to the administrator who can tweet back a configuration change, explained Ram Appalaraju, VP of marketing. Appalaraju said Enterasys expects to have half a dozen Isaac customers by next month.
Another example: A convention center in Canada runs a security network with surveillance cameras. When an alarm is generated, administrators can “tweet [the surveillance network] to take a picture, generate a photo and send it to them,” Appalaraju said.
Not requiring an NMS client applications means that such network management can be “more ubiquitous, anywhere and anytime,” added Vala Afshar, Enterasys’ chief customer officer. The social media support is “additive to our NMS,” not a replacement for it, he noted.
How secure can this possibly be? Enterasys claims to have security nailed with two-factor authentication, which uses randomly generated one-time passwords delivered externally to the social media cloud through SMS or email. Isaac also layers on audit capabilities, authorization, access control and encryption.
Isaac will available for all Enterasys NMS customers in July 2011. Isaac is complimentary to early adopters through Q4 2011; then pricing begins at $9,995 in 2012. Isaac will manage just Enterasys network devices to start. But the company has plans to support products from other network infrastructure vendors, too, which is when things are likely to get quite interesting.
