Major Part of U. S. National Defense
“One of our greatest challenges is trying to maintain the availability and performance of mission-critical applications and services. Infoblox capabilities like data collection and network analysis are key.” —Chief of cyberspace and network operations, U.S. national defense agency
The Customer
This customer is part of the U. S. national defense establishment, supporting tactical combat operations with network operations centers. The organization had been an Infoblox customer for 10 years at the time this story was written.
The Challenge
This customer is responsible for deploying network-operation centers (NOCs) that are manned by military field personnel. These centers provide mission and command-and-control functions critical to military operations, and their performance, up time, and visibility are of the utmost importance to national security.
“We have a lot of private-sector tools in our current NOCs,” says the organization’s chief of cyberspace and network operations. “One of our greatest challenges is trying to maintain the availability and performance of mission-critical applications and services supported by those tools. Capabilities like data collection and network analysis are key.”
The Infoblox Solution
What Infoblox NetMRI brings to the table, he says, is the unique ability to provide “best practices and subject-matter expertise in a box.” A scorecard gives the organizations’ users access to expert intelligence that other solutions don’t offer. The solution also delivers automated workflows that streamline processes in the intense circumstances the NOCs operate under. The organization implemented NetMRI as a pilot originally, and quickly scaled up to serve huge portions of the entire mission.
The Results
The chief of operations cites network data collection and analysis that improves network performance as one of the key benefits of Infoblox NetMRI, and he also notes that the solution addresses one of his major challenges—provisioning and re-provisioning contingency networks that have to reorganize rapidly in response to the fluid nature of military operations.
For the future, the organization is looking at other Infoblox technologies such as the Infoblox DNS/DHCP/IPAM (DDI) solution, which the chief of operations believes will add tremendous value to what NetMRI is already doing for the NOCs.