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December 2008 | Volume 11/ Number 12
Nitty Gritty

Managing Appliances with NEI’s ACE Smart Services

More and more ISVs are using appliances as a way to accelerate time to value and extend functional features to the end enterprise, but these ISVs and their customers often face many complexities when attempting to securely and reliably update, monitor, track and back-up these appliances. They’d rather focus on innovating the application rather than get mired in form factors, delivery mechanisms, interoperability, backbone OSs, updates and patches.

Fortunately, there’s now a solution from NEI (www.nei.com), a provider of application deployment platforms, appliances and services for storage, security, carrier-class and enterprise communications applications. ACE Smart Services is a “appliance lifecycle management solution” – a set of innovative software and services from NEI used to fully automate and improve appliance deployment management. This encompasses automated access, controls, and functional tools required to remotely, effectively and efficiently manage appliances deployed throughout the network. ACE fits into NEI’s holistic approach to appliance solution design, integration, support, management and value-add services. ISVs and their customers report that using appliances in the enterprise ecosystem is most cost-effective when a single interface manages the system, and ACE expands on this concept by enabling the application developer to manage the software as well as the appliance on which it resides, so customers don’t bear the cost or complexity of managing an open server. Furthermore, its centralized management helps ISVs gain a competitive advantage by consolidating engineering resources, exploiting technology synergies and creating turnkey, integration-ready solutions.




The ACE Smart Services package is comprised of three main components: 1) The Element Manager – ensures higher availability by enabling the remote monitoring and automated health management of deployed appliances. 2) Update Services – automates the process and management of delivering updates, patches and other upgrades to appliances deployed in field, including the operating system and all related applications. The service provides compressed and encrypted updates for dark sites. 3) OS Hardening – a process key that locks down (i.e., disables, removes and/or obscures features and services in) the underlying operating system to reduce the footprint, improve performance and reduce the vulnerability exposure of the appliance. ACE provides either Windows hardening or Linux package management to help ISVs create a highly optimized OS instance.

Adopting NEI’s ACE Smart Services is truly – dare I say it? – an ACE in the hole… IT

Richard Grigonis (News - Alert) is Executive Editor of TMC’s IP Communications Group.

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