Markus Nispel, Vice President of Solution Architecture for Enterasys (www.enterasys.com), says:

The data center plays a key role in supporting business applications and an increasingly mobile workforce. With the trend toward consolidation via virtualization and cloud computing, the need for automation, visibility and control is more important than ever before to keep up with the increasing complexity of managing today’s virtualized network. As a result, enterprises are being forced to rethink their data center design to ensure the performance and efficiency of computing and storage resources in the face of increasing application demands.

To meet these challenges, data center managers require networking solutions that go beyond basic high speed connectivity. The network must be interoperable, scalable and optimized to meet the automation and visibility requirements of a highly dynamic data center.
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The Data Center Manager
Enterasys Data Center Manager (DCM) is a powerful unified management solution that delivers visibility, control and automation over the whole data center fabric, including network infrastructure, servers, storage and applications, across both physical and virtual environments. Delivering network services in real-time in a virtualized environment, Enterasys DCM integrates with the Enterasys Network Management Suite (NMS), bridging the divide between virtual machines and network provisioning applications. With a unique vendor-agnostic approach, Enterasys DCM enables the unified management of the physical and virtual network, ensuring networks will have the high availability necessary for critical applications and business data.

The Benefits
Reduced capital costs: With Enterasys DCM, enterprises have the freedom to choose the server vendor that best fits their requirements, not the solution that will lock them into a single vendor approach. DCM interfaces directly with the native operating systems, providing server and VM visibility and control with no bias to the server or operating system vendor. The Enterasys solution is unique in the industry in supporting all major virtualization platforms, including Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX/vSphere, enabling organizations to leverage existing investments in the data center infrastructure.

Improved management control: Providing cradle-to-grave visibility into virtualized and physical assets, DCM automates the physical and virtual network configurations for virtual machines. Instead of requiring new software installed on the hypervisor, Enterasys DCM leverages each vendor’s APIs and Enterasys published APIs to provide automated inventory discovery and control over the hypervisor switch configuration, as well as management of the physical network configuration.

Lower operational costs: Enterasys DCM is designed to reduce IT administrative efforts with the automation of routine tasks and integration of existing management systems. The DCM notification engine provides comprehensive functionality and integrates with the workflows of other alerting tools already in place. Enterprises can leverage and extend existing automated processes to further reduce operational costs.