Infoblox adds master controller to product line
New IP appliance provides real-time visibility and control over large DNS, DHCP and IPAM deployments
By Carolyn Duffy Marsan | Network World US | Published: 13:00, 11 October 2011
Infoblox will unveil on Monday a new type of IP appliance aimed at its largest customers, which are increasingly delegating the management of critical network services to business units but want the IT department to monitor overall network performance.
Called the Trinzic Infoblox Multi-Grid Manager - or MGM - the new appliance provides real-time visibility and control over large, distributed DNS, Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) and IP Address Management (IPAM) deployments. The MGM costs about $21,000, and integrates with other Infoblox appliances connected to a grid.
Among the early adopters of the new MGM appliance are a holding company that has delegated responsibility for managing the IT infrastructure to its individual divisions, and a managed service provider that wants its network operations center to see how well the network is performing.
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Infoblox is also pitching the appliance at companies that have acquired other organisations and want visibility over their network services, as well as multinationals that are upgrading one region at a time to the next-generation Internet Protocol known as IPv6.
Infoblox says the MGM appliance is useful as the scale of networks continues to grow exponentially, and organisations turn to network segmentation to keep up with network management tasks.
"More and more employees are bringing their own devices into work... that's putting strain on core network services," says Kevin Dickson, vice president of product management at Infoblox. Dickson pointed out that the simultaneous push toward virtualisation, cloud computing, software as a service and IPv6 are also threatening network stability and adding to network management chores. "The exploding variety of IP devices inundating corporate networks and IT requires scale and segmentation."
The new MGM appliance can handle very large networks, with oversight of up to 50 grids. It can handle 3 billion queries per second and 5 billion DHCP requests during a 24-hour period.
