BlueCat Networks Pushes IP Address Management to New Heights

Award-winning Proteus IPAM platform adds intelligent workflow, self-provisioning and IP reconciliation capabilities

April 29, 2008; 07:06 AM

BlueCat Networks today announced the release of its latest version of Proteus, the company’s leading-edge IP Address Management (IPAM) platform. Furthering its commitment to product innovation, the next-generation solution now incorporates IPAM Workflow for change approval, IP Reconciliation for automated IP reclamation and a self provisioning system for user-driven IPAM requests.

Product Highlights:

Workflow – Delegate with Confidence

Enterprise organizations have dozens of administrators who need access to IPAM in order to make changes. However, not every administrator has the level of knowledge and skill needed to guarantee that the data they enter is correct and accurate. Proteus Workflow introduces a change approval mechanism that introduces an approval process for any changes made by lower-level administrators. Senior administrators are automatically notified when a change request is made so that they can review and approve the change.

Workflow allows senior administrators to delegate daily IPAM tasks to more junior administrators with the confidence and knowledge that any mistake made can be caught and corrected prior to going live across the network. This gives senior administrators time to focus on more strategic initiatives while still ensuring that any errors are proactively caught before a network disruption can occur.

Self Provisioning – Reduce IP Management Costs

The latest version of Proteus now provides Self Provisioning capabilities, an extension of workflow, as described above. In many organizations, the brunt of daily IPAM administration involves fulfilling user requests for new IP addresses, networks and DNS hosts. These requests often account for the lion’s share of the work in maintaining an IPAM system. Proteus now gives administrators the ability to automate user requests through a Self Provisioning portal or through direct tie-in to an organization’s existing change request tools. This is accomplished using the combined features of Proteus’ Next Available Network/IP Address, Workflow and the API. Users can make their own requests, have these automatically added to Proteus, and have an administrator notified in real-time who can approve the request. This drastically reduces the time and effort spent managing the IPAM system by helping to automate the single most demanding task.

IP Reconciliation – Intelligent IPAM Automation

For an IPAM solution to be effective, it must be kept up-to-date with what is occurring on the actual network. While DNS and DHCP integration help to achieve this, static IP address management can be a time consuming affair. Administrators need a way to validate the static IP data within Proteus to ensure that it is updated and accurate. IP Reconciliation builds on Proteus’ existing Network Discovery feature to provide administrators with the tools needed to automate static IP address management.

Using IP Reconciliation, administrators can track actual IP usage on the network and compare this to the data within Proteus. This allows administrators to unearth reclaimable IPs, those no longer in use on the network, as well as discover IPs in use that have not been permitted by Proteus. These ‘unknown’ IP addresses pose potential security risks as they could be rogue systems added to the network without authorization. Using IP Reconciliation, administrators are able to reconcile the data within Proteus with the actual network to ensure the accuracy of all IP data.

David Martinek, [email protected], 416-646-8415