Managing the lifecycle of your network equipment is a vital part of maintaining the security of your IT environment. Being able to verify that the equipment which underpins your IT is supportable, maintainable and replaceable should it fail is fundamental. But so few organisations really own this vital part of the upkeep of their IT.
IP Fabric maintains a full database of the network state, configuration and inventory, across all vendors and domains. As such it becomes a single point of truth for the equipment that underpins your IT. As the full inventory is held in that database, so it is an obvious point of reference for confirming that the equipment is supportable.
All vendors have their own management tooling for their hardware, but none of those are able to look at the network across all vendors and have a full view of the network estate. IP Fabric is vendor neutral: it is able to discover all networking devices and recognise them for what function they provide, and build the relationships between them. It can also track more specific information like whether or not there are end-of-sale, end-of-support or end-of-life (collectively known as EoX) announcements for the model of device or indeed module or part within the device.
As part of our release schedule, we extract all announced EoX dates from our supported vendors' documentation and embed that in our reporting. As such we group devices and parts within your inventory into views that show which devices have announced dates against them. We also maintain intent verification checks against that state and so can report on the state in a table or chart at each snapshot.
It is also possible to show that same status overlaid on the network diagrams in IP Fabric. When viewing a site topology, select the Intent Verification drop down to overlay information, and choose the widget that represents your EoX status.
The devices not impacted will be greyed out, but those that are affected are highlighted. Note the WLC-C4400 shown here, which has reached End of Support, and the Juniper EX220 and HP 2920 switches which have had an End of Sale announcement publicised:
If you have found this article helpful, please follow our company’s LinkedIn or Blog, where more content will be emerging. If you would like to test our solution to see for yourself how IP Fabric can help you manage your network more effectively, please contact us through www.ipfabric.io.
Managing the lifecycle of your network equipment is a vital part of maintaining the security of your IT environment. Being able to verify that the equipment which underpins your IT is supportable, maintainable and replaceable should it fail is fundamental. But so few organisations really own this vital part of the upkeep of their IT.
IP Fabric maintains a full database of the network state, configuration and inventory, across all vendors and domains. As such it becomes a single point of truth for the equipment that underpins your IT. As the full inventory is held in that database, so it is an obvious point of reference for confirming that the equipment is supportable.
All vendors have their own management tooling for their hardware, but none of those are able to look at the network across all vendors and have a full view of the network estate. IP Fabric is vendor neutral: it is able to discover all networking devices and recognise them for what function they provide, and build the relationships between them. It can also track more specific information like whether or not there are end-of-sale, end-of-support or end-of-life (collectively known as EoX) announcements for the model of device or indeed module or part within the device.
As part of our release schedule, we extract all announced EoX dates from our supported vendors' documentation and embed that in our reporting. As such we group devices and parts within your inventory into views that show which devices have announced dates against them. We also maintain intent verification checks against that state and so can report on the state in a table or chart at each snapshot.
It is also possible to show that same status overlaid on the network diagrams in IP Fabric. When viewing a site topology, select the Intent Verification drop down to overlay information, and choose the widget that represents your EoX status.
The devices not impacted will be greyed out, but those that are affected are highlighted. Note the WLC-C4400 shown here, which has reached End of Support, and the Juniper EX220 and HP 2920 switches which have had an End of Sale announcement publicised:
If you have found this article helpful, please follow our company’s LinkedIn or Blog, where more content will be emerging. If you would like to test our solution to see for yourself how IP Fabric can help you manage your network more effectively, please contact us through www.ipfabric.io.