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Home >>Products >>NetBrain Appliance 2.1

NetBrain Appliance 2.1

NetBrain Appliance is a high performance server to enable NetBrain Workstations inside a company or even across Internet to share network data, knowledge and work project. In case that NetBrain Workstation cannot access the live network, NetBrain Appliance can work as the live access proxy. Also some company wide tasks such as topology discovery and network benchmark can be run in Appliance and Workstation just need download the result.

NetBrain Appliance Services

Appliance has three types of key services:

1. Proxy service

For some Network, NetBrain Workstation is not able access all or some of network devices. NetBrain Appliance proxy service acts as an intermediary between a NetBrain workstation and the live network devices. It forwards the operation request from the Workstation to the destination device and then sends the operation result from the destination device to the Workstation.

2. CMDB service

CMDB service manages the network data including device configuration files, route tables, ARP tables, MAC tables, CDP tables and other. A version control system is developed to manage the historical network data. NetBrain Workstation can submit the data to CMDB and download the latest version or an old version of data from CMDB. NetBrain CMDB service also provides functions for two Workstations to share a workspace.

3. Benchmark service

Benchmark service benchmarks the network data following a user defined schedule. The data retrieved from the live network is submitted to CMDB. Benchmark service will call proxy service to access the live network if necessary. A user can benchmark configuration files, interface data, routing tables, ARP tables, MAC tables and CDP tables. Benchmark service also provides L2 topology discovery function.

4. Gateway service

For the large complex network, more than one proxy services are required for a good performance. Also more than one benchmark or CMDB services may be required for a large network. And then NetBrain Workstations and Benchmark services have to know which proxy service is used to access a network device and which CMDB to download the data for a network device. Thus a set of global data are required to maintain the relationship between network devices and CMDB services or Proxy services. Besides this data, there are some other types of global data such as L2 topology. The gateway service is used to manage this kid of data. The gateway has a web interface to manage the global data. The web interface is also used to set up NetBrain Appliance and view all Appliance service status.

The other important feature of Gateway service is to manage the user authentication. The administrator can manage all users and their roles via the web interface.

Collaborate via Appliance

Via NetBrain Appliance, network managers can collaborate on diary work and share network knowledge. A standard workflow is

A user creates a normal workspace in NetBrain Workstation and publishes the data to the gateway service and CMDB services. This is usually done by a power user or an administrator to know the network well. NetBrain Workstation 2.1 provides easily used interface for the collaboration, including publishing the workspace, upload and downloading the data.
The administrator defines the benchmark task and setup CMDB services. He can define the starting time, the frequency, type of data to be retrieved in the benchmark task. Benchmark service will submit data retrieved from the live network to CMDB services.
The ordinary user downloads the data from the CMDB Service to the NetBrain Workstation. He can easily create a workspace using the downloaded data.

After these steps, all NetBrain workstations are able to collaborate. Benchmark service will run the defined benchmark task and submit the data to CMDB service. And NetBrain workstations can also submit the data to CMDB service and download the updated data from CMDB service.

Appliance Setup and Deployment

NetBrain Appliance will be run in window 2003 server. If the customer has the machine running in the other operating system, Appliance will be run in a virtual machine (VM) of window 2003 server.

For a large network, two or more proxy services, benchmark services and CMDB services can be deployed for a large network to gain good performances. Please be aware that Appliance service is a software unit and a physical Appliance can run any combination of these types of services. Also one AP proxy service is totally independent of other proxy services and the same is true for Benchmark services and CMDB services.

The scenario of the physical Appliance deployment is based on the network state, especially the network size. For example, for a network with less than 500 network sizes, only one appliance to run all four services may be enough. And for a big network with 5000 network devices, several Appliances may be required to cover the whole network and NetBrain support team will work with the customer to come up a carefully thought deployment plan.