Blind Spots Covered With nLayers

Device discovery vendor nLayers is giving administrators a whole new view of its network with the built-in ability to find network and storage devices.

The San Jose, Calif.-based company launched the capability in its point update to nLayers InSight, version 4.5, Monday.

InSight is an agent-less — meaning administrators don’t have to install a file on a device to be recognized — network discovery tool that maps and models the components in the enterprise. It provides a real-time picture of the network, tracking resource dependencies, demand and usage.

Gili Raanan, nLayers founder and CEO, said many of his company’s competitors the past year have talked about the software and servers on the network, but that only paints part of the picture that’s going on within the network.

When there’s a failure at the network, one that could affect the company’s service level agreement (SLA) with customers, administrators are left with a huge blind spot if they don’t have a picture of the performance of storage and network devices.

“If you’re blind to that you cannot troubleshoot — you can’t fix and restore the service,” he said. “Just knowing the software and servers is not enough. You also need to know the storage and network devices that need to relocate or be cloned so that business services can be fully functional in the new or alternate location.”

The point release introduces new scanning abilities to track resources on the network. Version 4.5 has added IP address device scanning and telnet scanning for routers and switches to a scanning mix that already includes Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) , Secure Shell (SSH) and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) .

A Fingerpoint Factory has been included with InSight 4.5, a wizard that lets administrators point to custom or legacy applications in the network that might be overlooked in a normal scan.

InSight 4.5 runs $75 per node in blocks of 1,000 nodes.