Network Housekeeper Infoblox Buys Netcordia

Infoblox, a specialist making hardware appliances for network housekeeping chores such as Domain Name System servers, is to acquire Netcordia. Now its products can shoulder the tediouis work of network change and configuration management too.

The deal brings together companies with products responsible for increasingly important data centre management functions. Netcorid’s sofware looks after network change management, while Infoblox does the dull-but-necessary work of DDI — an acronym for the combination of DNS, DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) and IPAM (Internet Protocol Address Management). Terms of the transaction were not disclosed, and Infoblox will begin integrating Netcordia immediately.

Expanding network duties

“Netcordia’s market momentum, customer base, technology and exceptional employees, coupled with Infoblox’s team and unique real-time data distribution and management expertise, will be invaluable to positioning Infoblox for continued success as a leading provider of both DDI and NCCM solutions,” Robert Thomas, president and CEO of 10-year-old Infoblox, said in a conference call.

Infoblox was founded in 1999 and has shipped about 40,000 DNS appliances to more than 3,400 customers worldwide, including 145 of the Fortune 500, expanding to include IP address management.

As data centers continue to take on more storage, networking and servers — not to mention virtual machines, and virtualised storage and servers — management of all these functions becomes increasingly complex.

Application patch management across a large IT system, for example, presents among the thorniest of these challenges, and single-pane control of this function, which is what Infoblox provides, is a welcome asset to IT managers.

Another example of what the new Infoblox will be able to do as a result of adding Netcordia is that when an unknown or unexpected IP address shows up on a network, Infoblox’s current software can detect it, but can’t do anything proactive about it. Using Netcordia’s discovery and search functions, Infoblox now will be able to trace and locate the IP address and remove it from the system, if necessary.

“I was surprised to hear this. Most of the consolidation in the space has taken place at the hands of the larger platform suite vendors, who have selected NCCM technologies to sort of fill in their portfolios of solutions,” Jim Frey, a senior analyst with Enterprise Management Associates, told the conference call audience. “There has been a steady and unending increase in the rate of change in the network layer, driven in large part by virtualisation and the cloud. Automation is really the only practical answer.”

Steve Nye, Infoblox executive vice president of product strategy, told the conference call audience that the two companies have little product overlap and their software can stand alone or be used in tandem, depending on the needs of the customer.

“This level of automation is becoming even more important as network managers are taxed to support an ever-growing number of IP devices [and] new applications like virtualization and cloud computing, and meet stringent availability and compliance regulations,” Nye said.

Infoblox is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, while Netcordia is based in Annapolis, Maryland. Netcordia’s employees will be retained in the acquisition, Infoblox said.