NetACE – The Ideal Solution for Managing Complex Data Centers

In this blog I would to address one very interesting and in terms of digitalization perhaps most advanced application segment: operation of large data centers. Data centers are more and more distributed over several locations with global coverage. Due to historical or other reasons they are often structured in separated “islands” where a single vendor’s equipment is used. Each of those “islands” is managed by the respective vendor’s operation and management systems. However, many of those data center operators (usually large enterprises) are looking for a unified cross-vendor solution that will provide the ability to view and maintain the entire data network.

The Challenges

So we find here the well known challenges from large public operator’s network just in the context of pure data network:

• Unified control and monitoring over global multi-vendor data center.
• Discovery of all existing devices and services installed.
• Optimization across multi-vendor equipment.
• Simple and error free, as much as possible, automated orchestration (create, modify, delete) of services.

NetACE as Solution

Those challenges are kind of a “natural match” for NetACE:

• With a built in discovery function, it can identify within minutes (hours for very large networks) all existing devices, their connection to each other (i.e. the complete data center topology) as well as all installed services and used resources. When the identification process is over, all the information is stored in a unified manner in one single (multi-redundant) database.
• Based on the stored information, the optimization of an existing network is now can be easily done. The miss-configured devices or wrong connections can be removed, unused resources can be identified or the relicts or older unproperly removed services can be cleaned up.
• A unified and consolidated control and monitoring for the entire multi-vendor network is available and fully automated service lifecycle orchestration is possible.
• By using the NetACE simple REST API for upper layer management systems (e.g. CRM-systems) or micro services are able to install, modify or delete error-free and fully automated new services like VPNs throughout the entire network within seconds.

 NetACE as Perfect Solution  

Why is NetACE fitting so well for managing large, world-wide distributed multi-vendor networks including all services installed?  Here are the major reasons in a nutshell:

• Integrated Heritage: the discovery-part of NetACE is very sophisticated enhancement to Atrinet’s previous tool (ASPEN), which was designed to simplify and automated services discovery in data networks. It therefore includes not only years of R&D and product optimization in advanced Network & Service Management experience, but also a huge amount of data of most relevant Network Elements (NEs) of practically all known vendor – it includes all MIBs, knows all CLI-commands and communicate with all Network access protocols (SNMP, TL1, NETCONF, REST, SOAP, S/FTP,..). In the seldom case that a NE is not known, it can be added to the data base within max. of 1 hour, with NetACE easy to use Device Manager – no need for adaption software, just modeled according to the respective abstraction rules. So far we could not found any device, that incorporating it into the NetACE Database  took more than 1 hour.
• Fast & Simple: assuming you have a medium size data network (around thousand devices, several thousand services installed from 3-4 different vendors in 10 different locations around the globe: then expert team would have NetAce fully installed and acquire the entire network elements and services within 2-3 days* and you would have the following benefits:
  • Complete overview of all network devices, resources and connections (i.e. complete network topology.
  • All this information is stored in one (logical) one single (physically) redundant big-data ready database.
  • Management and control of all devices from one central location.
  • Complete Service lifecycle orchestration.
  • Standard connections via REST API to upper-layer management for all management and orchestration functions.

*We assume that no very old or very exotic vendor is in your network. Depending on the knowledge of the respective NMS-interface for such an exotic case the entire exercise may take 1-2 weeks.

You want to verify this promise – feel free to contact us, request a demo or a free trial – more information can be found on Atrinet’s website (https://www.atrinet.com/).