Men&Mice Suite version 6.5 for DDI released

Men&Mice, a leading provider of DNS, DHCP and IP Address Management (IPAM) solutions, announces the release of the Men&Mice Suite version 6.5.

The new release focuses on providing operational security and the ability to expand customer infrastructure.

Traditionally the Men&Mice Suite has been deployed as an overlay management solution for core DNS and DHCP services. As more customers become reliant on the Men&Mice Suite for the automation and control of their critical network infrastructure, any potential downtime can affect provisioning systems and other automated processes that must operate without interruption. To address the need for this absolute reliability, version 6.5 of the Men&Mice Suite comes with even more complete High Availability functionality.

Cloud environments have become an important part of the enterprise network, and traditionally the visibility into the DDI component of the cloud has been limited. Version 6.5 of the Men&Mice Suite now enables customers to manage core infrastructure services in the OpenStack cloud environment as seamlessly and easily as they manage their internal networks.

Higlights

High Availability

Version 6.5 of the Men&Mice Suite enables customers to configure and run Men&Mice Suite (Central) in a HA mode. This means that multiple copies of the Men&Mice Central can be run simultaneously on the network, and at any given time one of them will be the active instance. If an active instance of the Men&Mice Suite fails or is taken down for any reason, one of the other instances will assume the active role. When that happens all clients, whether they be regular user interfaces or script APIs, will automatically fail over to the new Central. With the new HA setup customers can run their critical automation processes without fear of interruption from possible downtime.

OpenStack integration

Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Cloud stack solutions that act as an IaaS platform are increasingly becoming a common part of the enterprise infrastructure. The Men&Mice Suite version 6.5 contains integration with OpenStack, an open source project for service providers, enterprises, government agencies and academic institutions that want to build public or private clouds. Multiple teams within an organization, each with their own cloud instances and multiple networks and subnets, are faced with the problem of limited visibility into their cloud environment. Men&Mice integrates the software defined networks with the traditional networks that exist in the enterprise environment enabling a global view into every aspect of the network infrastructure. The "good citizen" nature of the Men&Mice Suite continues to be preserved so the OpenStack networks can be created and configured through the Suite but the solution will also adapt to changes done outside of the Men&Mice Suite, either through the Horizon UI or through the OpenStack API.
Additionally, changes to OpenStack networking can be done through the Men&Mice Suite SOAP API, which can utilize the authentication, authorization and activity logging in Men&Mice. The result is gaining the flexibility of a cloud environment while still retaining all the security and control possible through the Men&Mice Suite.

Other improvements

In this new release the documentation and help has been moved from the operational manual format to a web based format. This change will ensure that all users get guaranteed access to the latest version of the help and documentation.
As in previous releases of the Men&Mice Suite, the new version contains various other enhancements that are intended to improve ease-of-use, stability and performance.