I clearly remember when my oldest son first made the transition from crawling to toddling about the house. It was probably one of the scariest parenting moments for me. I was witness to the exploits of a child who was clearly exhilarated and experimenting with this new found mobility – yet clearly lacking the experience or the balance to avoid disastrous outcomes. So while my wife and I were super vigilant as parents, we also endured the most emergency room visits of our lives.
But we survived, and that’s the natural order of things. Progress happens in stages, and at each stage you do something, you make mistakes, you break things, you learn, and you move forward.
This notion of crawl, walk, run is built into in modern processes across industries today. Lean Six Sigma actually refers to it in those very words and contrasts it against the “all or nothing” approach. In software, Agile development (the idea of building code in smaller increments and rapid prototyping) is now preferred over legacy “Waterfall” approaches which dictated long build periods followed by long testing and deployment times.
In IT, we are now witness to a new generation of data center infrastructure deployments (like private and hybrid clouds) going through similar staged approaches: Pilot, Production, Multi-Platform.
At Infoblox, we believe in Crawl, Walk, Run. Today, we put out a press release announcing Infoblox Cloud Network Automation, a new set of products that help automate private cloud networks. We expect the products themselves will be a great help to IT departments and networking teams. But the real beauty is that we designed the solution to fit any stage of our customers’ journey.
For pilot clouds, we offer free adapters which connect Infoblox with customers’ cloud management platforms (VMware, Microsoft, OpenStack). These adapters take information from the cloud infrastructure and pass it to Infoblox appliances which will automatically provision IP addresses, set up DNS entries, and establish DHCP leases. As virtual machines (VMs) are decommissioned, all of the clean-up happens automatically.
For production private clouds, we now offer the new Cloud Network Automation console that gives our customers one place for global visibility, command and control over those private cloud network elements. Now customers can see real-time and historical information on their VMs and cloud resources as they are created, with automation to handle provisioning tasks.
For multi-platform cloud deployments, where the customers’ private clouds have grown to multiple data centers in multiple geographical locations, Infoblox now offers the new virtual Cloud Platform Appliance. These appliances are deployed in every place there is a private cloud, and each appliance will service the network automation needs for that cloud independently. If something happens to the cloud in one location, the others keep working and local survivability is enhanced.
We believe Infoblox Cloud Network Automation will help our customers crawl, walk and run faster through the private cloud – and make for fewer trips to the IT equivalent of the emergency room.