Enterasys debuts data centre manager

a management system designed to provide visibility, automation and control over physical and virtual data center resources.

The Enterasys Data Center Manager (DCM) is a key component of the data center strategy Enterasys announced earlier this year. That strategy hinges on partnerships and multivendor inclusion, as well as the policy-based management capabilities of its switches.

DCM is the policy-based manager of Enterasys switches, but also provides visibility into servers, storage and applications across physical and virtual environments, the company says. It provides IT with a tool for tracking and historical reporting on virtual machine movement, allowing users to ensure the proper network resources are allocated when a VM is provisioned.

Brocade and Cisco also enable this with their data centre managers and switches. Brocade calls this capability Automatic Migration of Port Profiles; Cisco calls it service profiles and it’s an integral component of its Unified Computing System server/switch/storage access platform.

The capability in DCM, and in competitors’ products, allows the IT administrator to group VMs into supporting business roles. DCM detects, registers and authenticates VMs, provides access control, and automates policy assignment for VLANs, class of service, quality of service, rate limiting and rate shaping.

With DCM, server, networking and storage teams each have a view of virtual server and network environments, and a unified provisioning process through the system’s ability to automate the application of individual policies to various data objects in the switching fabric.

DCM also provides dynamic configuration of the virtual switch and physical infrastructure.

Enterasys DCM works with server virtualisation products from Citrix, Microsoft and VMware. The software is available now in two versions: DCM Basic, which is limited to a maximum of 10 VMware ESX or Citrix XenServer hosts and 100 VMs on the network; and DCM Advanced, which supports up to 50 ESX or XenServer hosts and 1,000 VMs.