October 16th, 2007 by James Cerwinski
Categories: Asset Management, CommandCenter NOC, Network Monitoring
Release 6.0 is Now Available from the Download Server
Release 6.0 is now available from the download server.
It includes the following new capabilities:
At a glance view of your total network and outages - Network Topology Map - The system will now automatically discover your network, provide the interconnection topology in Map form, provide red light notifications for outages, and the ability to drill down for more detail on the outage and the node.
Presents the most important notifications - Event Correlation - Presents the root cause event or notification and suppresses secondary events.
Enhanced data export - ODBC access - Enables data export to ODBC capable systems. For example you can now use Crystal reports or SQL to access the data in the CC-NOC and create custom reports.
For more detail read the release notes.
Set your CC-NOC to look for new updates. If it finds 6.0.5 follow the instructions to install. If it does not find the new release it is most likely that your CC-NOC is not registered in our download server. In that case, provide the following information to our tech support and they will help you.
tech-ccnoc@raritan.com
CC-NOC Model
Serial number
MAC Address
September 26th, 2007 by J
Categories: Development & Testing, Virtualization, CommandCenter NOC, Network Monitoring
Virtual appliances from the software developers point of view
My name is Jason and I am one of the software engineers on the team. I joined the team after Raritan bought Oculan. My job is to create new features, improve performance, maintain and repair older functions. While I cannot take credit for much of the code base, I can tell you that I am happy to work on it. I work with some of the most knowledgeable and talented network management software engineers around - Including a co-founder of OpenNMS and three of the original lead OpenNMS developers.
When I came to Raritan, I was excited to find a team that was doing network management in the Raleigh area. On top of getting to work on network management Raritan was developing network management software within a standalone appliance. This appliance strategy was one that I had suggested at previous positions.
On the development side the appliance model quickly increases simplicity and decreases overhead. We write code for one database, one operating system, and one web server. We do not have to worry about competing for server ports, database resources, IO time, or OS prerequisites with other applications. This means we have more time to do the fun stuff, coding new features, exploring new products, and improving performance. By minimizing the time spend doing “plumbing”, we get more time to find new ways to improve your life. Yeah, I’m a geek. I like this stuff. I would always prefer to solve real problems and provide real solutions over spending time fixing issues that could be solved strategically.
On the user side, the appliance model provides software that is focused on network management and not interoperability matrices. An appliance does not just provide increased functionality for the buck. It provides greater security, more reliable performance, improved serviceability and easier upgrades.
A network management device gathers information that helps you understand your network. This is information an intruder can use to understand their own options for compromising a network. You need it to be secure. By taking charge of the operating system, we are able to maintain it. We aren’t going to require a Windows Admin to go out and buy an HP-UX or BSD box. You aren’t going to want to be responsible for securing an operating system you’ve never used before. We are going to take care of administrating it for you. Plus, an appliance is not going to have anything more than what is required to do its job properly. We harden the operating system and we do not open up a potential vulnerability that is unnecessary for our operation.
The appliance applications are the only user of resources on an appliance. By being the sole resource user an appliance application does not need a complex installation process to determine what resources are already used. Nor does it need a complicated start-up process to see what resources were taken by another application during downtime. With network management, the application is timing sensitive. You want to know about a potential problem or a real outage as soon as possible, so you can do preventative maintenance or in the case of an outage get folks back online sooner.
When it comes to serviceability, we are able to service your equipment more completely because we can securely control your whole operating system (with your express permission). We can recreate a problem you have been seeing and we can work to fix it immediately and gain greater insight on the cause. This insight allows us to write software to prevent a recurrence.
With all these positives, we have found some disadvantages to a hardware appliance. A hardware appliance takes up a whole 1U in your rack space. It would be eating space and power that might go to multiple virtual machines. Plus, if there is a hardware failure (they are rare, but they happen), you have to RMA the hardware back to the vendor. That is time lost without network management. Sure, anyone with good customer service is going to work to get you back running asap, but that’s time lost when you could’ve thrown in some spare parts and continued with life.
Raritan has recognized that a virtualized environment provides a number of benefits to our users. We understand that our job is to make your life easier. Just as I prefer a uniform installation base to code against, you prefer uniform hardware to manage. You can buy groups of identical servers and keep some spare parts on hand. Plus with all these spare parts, you can fix the hardware quickly and take advantage of the easier backup and restore processes that come with VMware. You get more time to do the fun stuff. By being prepared, you are able to recover from disaster with greater efficacy.
What about those other benefits of being a standalone appliance? What about the increased functionality, the greater security, reliable performance, serviceability, and upgrades? Well, we are a virtual appliance. We still write software that works on the same operating system as before. We have added a few new functions to our product creation process to handle the idea of being inside VMware instead of being inside a piece of hardware. So, no loss in functionality. VMware provides a secure location for us to run, we are not sharing a file-system or data with any other applications. No other virtual machines can access your network management data. Your performance is controlled just as you control your other VMware virtual hosts. You can provide limits to our virtual appliance and to other virtual hosts to guarantee resources for network management. Our serviceability and upgrade-ability have not not changed between our hardware and full featured virtual hardware offerings.
We will be posting about network management, security issues, virtualization, and whatever else we think you will find relevant. We hope you find our contributions informative. We know this is yet another corporate blog, and our content will be the only thing that can make it stand out. We took the same approach with our product. The content of our free download is built to stand out too.
Thanks for reading,
J
September 24th, 2007 by James Cerwinski
Categories: Asset Management, CommandCenter NOC, Network Monitoring
Network Monitoring for SMB by C&S Networking Solutions, Inc.
The following write-up was submitted to me for posting by Sky Caserotti. Sky is the president of C&S Networking Solutions, Inc. and he wanted to share his story about bringing affordable network monitoring to the SMB market.
When I first heard about the CC-NOC, I was as skeptical as the next person, especially after hearing about “New Mouse Traps” for 20+ years in the industry.
After we researched the product, we quickly discovered that
Soon, our company, C&S Networking Solutions, Inc., in
After we’d partnered with our local Raritan distributor (Midwest Computer Accessories) on several
Our customers are finding that they can now have high-end Managed Services at their disposal for a fraction of what this might cost by outsourcing the process. It’s also been a fantastic catalyst for revenue generation. For my existing customers, they’re paying a small monthly fee to have us provide metrics and monitoring services. Some others are simply having us implement this for their overburdened IT staff at a reasonable installation cost.
As we move forward with this product and continue to work with
C&S Networking Solutions, Inc
5611 S. Meridian, Suite C
O. 317-638-7719
F. 317-781-7990
September 19th, 2007 by James Cerwinski
Categories: Asset Management, CommandCenter NOC, Network Monitoring
Network Monitoring Toolset - New Release Available!
New release just posted for download! What’s new?
- VMware(r) Certified as “Production Ready”
- 6.0 Feature Set (Map, Event Correlation, & Data Export)
- Free Fully Featured SMB Version
The CommandCenter NOC is an “easy to use” agent-less network monitoring toolset providing integrated:
- asset management
- network discovery
- network & server monitoring
- service polling, SNMP, & WMI
- traffic analysis & Netflow
- vulnerability scanning
- intrusion detection
- turnkey solution includes hardened Linux OS & DB
Raritan is offering our latest release of our award winning network
monitoring toolset with a free license to support your 10 most
critical nodes.
September 14th, 2007 by James Cerwinski
Categories: Virtualization, CommandCenter NOC
eWeek Reviews CC-NOC VMware Virtual Appliance
Raritan network monitoring product goes virtual with CommandCenter NOC VMware Virtual Appliance.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2174831,00.asp
“The combination of diagnostic tools, traffic reports, inventory collection and management, and vulnerability assessment and security monitoring make this virtual appliance a hot ticket for small shops.”
