Enterasys Unveils Vendor Agnostic Data Center Strategy

June 18, 2010

Enterasys detailed its vendor agnostic data center strategy, and unveiled the first in a series of new offerings and partnerships to provide customers with open and highly automated data center network solutions.

Enhanced automation functionality in the Enterasys S-Series “virtualizes” network connectivity, eliminating the complexity of data center network provisioning that can plague highly virtualized environments. This functionality detects virtual machine changes and automatically configures application-specific network policies, priorities and bandwidth across both the virtual and physical environments. In stark contrast to solutions that require manual administrative intervention in response to virtual machine movements, this built-in automation reduces administrative overhead and complexity, ensures high application availability and provides a consistent end user experience.

“As the enterprise increasingly moves toward fully virtualized data centers to streamline operations and reduce costs, IT organizations must reconcile server and network management applications which have historically operated as separate islands in the data center,” said Steven J. Schuchart Jr., principal analyst, Current Analysis. “The Enterasys data center solution provides integrated visibility and decentralized control of physical and virtual data center networks, enabling customers to provision servers and network services via a tightly integrated workflow and approval process tools.”

“With the Enterasys S-Series and Network Management Suite, we have a data center solution with self-healing features and built-in redundancy to provide maximum reliability for our network,” said Matthew McEwen, vice president at Stephens Inc. “No other solution comes close to offering the range of capabilities to automatically apply the correct network settings to virtual machines and storage devices as they move within the data center network. This type of visibility greatly reduces the time we spend managing the network, and allows us to provision servers and network services in a streamlined fashion.”

With data center solutions that avoid the lock-you-in approach other vendors promote, Enterasys offerings are designed to optimize and interoperate with multiple virtualization vendors, including Citrix, Microsoft and VMware; and multiple server and storage vendors, including Dell, HP and IBM. In the coming quarters, Enterasys will continue to fulfill its vision with additional customer-focused and vendor agnostic data center networking solutions with a series of hardware, software and partnership announcements designed to provide customers with industry-leading automation and visibility features.