Matt's Blog

Over the past year, I have had the opportunity to talk with many customers, partners and prospects of Netcordia and it’s been very interesting to see the changes in terms of requirements and functionality in dealing with network configuration, change and compliance management.  Our engineering team has been hard at work developing our newest release, NetMRI 4, to meet and exceed the current needs of our customers as well as help them understand and plan for new challenges and requirements likely to hit their IT teams in the near future. 

• More distributed architectures – As organizations embrace technologies such as virtualization, cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS), the need to manage devices across a more distributed architecture becomes much more critical.  The newest release of NetMRI and the re-architected NetMRI Operations Center greatly enhances the scalability and flexibility with a distributed architecture capability by allowing multiple NetMRIs to roll up into a single user interface which results in coordinated management of much larger networks.  
• Virtual appliance and virtual machine options – Netcordia always focused on providing a solution that was easy to deploy with a fast time to value and historically delivered a solution as a turn-key appliance.  As more organizations are using VMWare, the newest release of NetMRI provides users the option of deploying either a physical or virtual appliance.  By applying elastic leverage of applied virtual machine resources, users can add more resources like CPU and memory and NetMRI will do more with better performance.  The virtual appliance can help improve the ROI by leveraging existing systems to maximize the performance of NetMRI within existing architecture. 
• Multi-tenant views – As both managed service provider and enterprises are deploying NetMRI to a wider number and range of users, the multi-tenancy views enable customers to provide multiple views to different users or organizations all within a single platform.  The multi-tenant capability greatly improves the return on investment by leveraging a single console across a range of users.
• IT automation – With the economic downturn, the need to automate more IT processes and procedures becomes even more critical.  NetMRI 4 adds new automation capabilities including auto-remediation and job triggering when issues are identified, collecting diagnostic information, configuration rollback and managing a myriad of jobs with an enhanced automation wizard.
• Downloadable option – The new virtual appliance capability allows prospects to download and try NetMRI quickly and easily.  While other management tools require multiple downloads and configurations of systems, databases and operating systems, the new NetMRI download puts everything into a single file (including NetMRI, VMWare Player and database) to make it easier and faster to implement.
• Operationalization – As more organizations are tearing down the silos between IT departments, the importance of operationalization across a wide range of users is more important.   NetMRI 4 provide more details to more users with enhanced notification, advanced network and configuration searching, live interface performance stats, configurable long-term storage options and scheduled reports.
• Embedded expertise – With new compliance and best practice standards, IT organizations need help keeping up to speed.  NetMRI 4 added more embedded analysis content including STIG and IAVA monitoring to the already rich set of analysis historically part of NetMRI. 

I am very excited about the new capabilities NetMRI 4 provides to our enterprise customers, managed service providers and partners.  To learn more, you can view the press release, see what’s new in NetMRI 4 or download your free trial of NetMRI 4.