* Orion NPM 10.1 includes support for Cisco UCS plus end-to-end service views
As everybody knows, peering into today’s data centers provide a whole different view than just a year or two ago.
You’ll have your traditional IP-based network devices as well as Fibre Channel storage switches, of course. But you’ll also have the virtual infrastructure coming at you front and center, including new systems aimed at bringing together compute, storage and network resources.
This, of course, brings a slew of new and different challenges for managing the data center network — and traditional network management are optimizing their products for this new world view. Last week, for example, SolarWinds rolled out new and enhanced features for its flagship Orion Network Performance Monitor (NPM) with an eye toward improving data center network management.
For example, Orion NPM 10.1 includes support for Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS), which ties together servers, storage, networking and virtualization, so that IT managers can monitor virtual interfaces, fabric interconnects and physical servers in that environment.
“The data center network obviously has become an extremely complex environment, much more so then the LAN or WAN access networks. There are several challenges customers have as they look at monitoring the network within the data center, the first being visibility into the right types of devices … including integrated systems like UCS,” says Sanjay Castelino, vice president of product management at SolarWinds.
Toward that end, SolarWinds also enhanced support for VMware monitoring and is providing new ways to view management data.
The most important new view, Castelino says, is Dynamic Services Group, which allows IT managers to group network devices by any category and roll up network performance and service-level status by location, business center or any other grouping.
“This is our way of grouping elements together within the network as an IT service. For example, you might want to group your Exchange Servers, Web servers and WAN access network interfaces together and call that a messaging service and monitor those as a single entity,” he describes.
Orion NPM 10.1 is available now, starting at $2,475, including the first year of maintenance.
