Organizations are more dependent on their network today than ever before. The LAN switch is a critical component, providing the final handoff to local network devices including VOIP phones, desktops, servers, printers, point-of-sale terminals, etc. A local network is always evolving, with new devices and applications being deployed weekly or even daily. It is critical to be able to define and deploy consistent policy in an automated way across all the customer’s LAN switches. Moves, adds, changes and deletes (MACD) on the LAN switch (like turning up or down a port, configuring the port, and tuning VLAN, QoS and security policies) are often time consuming and error prone when done manually.
Most IT organizations are currently performing these changes manually via CLI which can take hours per change particularly across a wide range of switches. Due to the manual nature, these tasks often consume a significant amount of time from the IT staff – preventing them from working on more strategic tasks. Any errors can result in degraded performance, that can be very difficult to troubleshoot once deployed.
QoS and VLAN management are two of the most critical features on the LAN switch, and these features are being updated on a frequent basis. IT organizations need a central location for defining QoS and VLAN policies that can then be pushed out to all the LAN switches in their network, both quickly and reliably.
