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May 26, 2006
• Vol.28 Issue 21
Page(s) 1 in print issue
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Automating Networks
How Uplogix Works To Offload Costly Network Maintenance & Recovery
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 If your IT resources are constantly drained by network support issues, it might be time to offload some of that management to an automated tool that can monitor devices and squash problems with little or no human intervention. But not all automated technologies are built the same, and Uplogix believes its products give you reliable monitoring and support you won’t find elsewhere.
Uplogix’s bread and butter is Envoy, a network appliance that delivers automated control over a variety of devices from manufacturers such as Cisco, Nortel, Juniper, and Tasman. Envoy performs an array of administration tasks, including configuration of drop-shipped devices, recovery from failed configurations, diagnosis and recovery of remote problems, and automated patching and password changes.
According to Uplogix, Envoy is unlike other network management tools that simply monitor, collect, and report because Envoy takes the extra step of automatically performing diagnostics and recovery.
 Forget The Technician
Born from innovators looking for a new way to manage distributed enterprise networks, Uplogix combined minds from the software development industry and network management industry to create a new platform for automated network management.
“We provide a lot of the same kinds of things you would get if a network technician showed up at a wiring closet with his laptop and started troubleshooting problems when you have an outage,” says James Dollar, vice president of products for Uplogix.
By collecting and saving configuration settings for network devices, Envoy can provide one-click configuration restoration, even for operating system components. Partial restorations, which allow administrators to roll back specific changes without impacting the full configuration, are also supported. These and other abilities can save time for enterprises, particularly those without dedicated personnel who can regularly tackle such tasks.
“Smaller companies generally don’t have the expertise in-house to manage their network,” says Dollar. “Keeping up with technology and ways to resolve problems is a huge job for the big companies to do, much less the small ones. For instance, a company might own three different brands of networking gear—maybe a Juniper, a Cisco, and a Nortel. Remembering how to change the passwords on all three of those might be a difficult thing to do. We’ll take a password change function like that and extract it to the manufacturer and the code it’s running, and if you want to change passwords across your network, you can say, ‘Change password on all these devices.’”
Similar time-saving concepts apply to recovery techniques, which can be a royal pain to smaller companies that don’t encounter certain types of system failures enough to easily recover them. Dollar explains that instead of digging through manuals, companies using Envoy can be assured the appliance will automatically apply best-practice recovery procedures.
Another key selling point is Envoy’s direct connection to devices via the serial port, which Dollar describes as “the only reliable connection to the device.” Although other devices using out-of-band technologies also provide access to network devices using serial connectivity, Uplogix adds intelligence to the mix, in essence creating what it calls IOOB (Intelligence Out-of-Band) architecture. Instead of one-way, manual device management, IOOB allows for robust management and automated control at the network’s edge.
“If the main link goes down, [Envoy has] the ability via an onboard modem or, in the case of satellite-based networks, via satellite-based modems, to reestablish a secure, alternate communications path so that the management data is always flowing,” says Bill Talbot, director of marketing for Uplogix. “Envoy always has the capability to do its job, to take actions, and report that information back up to the central management console.”
But how steep is the learning curve for Envoy? “It’s not quite a dial that you turn, but when you set it up, we take you through a number of wizards to determine what kind of devices are there and what your support posture is for them,” says Dollar.
EMS To The Rescue
For companies running multiple Envoys, Uplogix also offers EMS, or the Envoy Management Station, which serves as a central, Web-based management portal. Because each Envoy supports up to four network devices, even smaller companies could employ multiple Envoys. And with a simple, GUI-oriented architecture, the EMS gives administrators an immediate, thorough view of all Envoys and network devices.
The EMS, delivered on a Dell PowerEdge with dual 3GHz Xeon processors, 4GB RAM, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, provides a dashboard view of all managed Envoys and devices; an alarms view that details the duration, status, and detailed messages from alarms across the enterprise; and aggregated device statistics.
“A small company might not want to go invest in an HP OpenView or Netcool solution and could use our central management platform as a manager of managers, if you will—a single alarm screen and a single place to start resolving problems on your network,” says Dollar.
The 4-port Envoy lists for $2,800, and the EMS lists for $12,500. 
by Christian Perry
View the chart that accompanies this article.
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