Raritan today announced that its network and systems monitoring appliance has gone virtual. Designed for small and midsized organizations needing integrated IT health monitoring and asset management capabilities at an affordable price, Raritan's CommandCenter(R) NOC (CC-NOC) is now available as a virtual appliance for even easier deployment.

As a virtual appliance, CC-NOC easily and quickly introduces an integrated and rich toolset for IT organizations to use to improve overall service availability, network performance, security and asset management -- at a fraction of the cost of ownership and complexity of other solutions. CC-NOC Virtual Appliance, which leverages VMware virtualization software, can run on standard hardware already in the customer's environment, thus simplifying or eliminating hardware procurement and deployment issues. 

The CC-NOC Virtual Appliance is agent-less, pre-built and pre-configured with the application, database, operating system and Web server. Available starting today, the downloadable solution can be purchased through Raritan's partner network or by visiting http://www.commandcenter-noc.com. A free trial version of CC-NOC can also be downloaded from Raritan's Web site. CC-NOC solutions can support environments from five servers to 500 servers.

Pricing starts at $1,795.

Raritan also introduced new CC-NOC features (v 6.0) -- which are available in the new virtual appliances and 1U hardware appliance family. The new features provide additional levels of insight into an IT infrastructure and improve availability through faster problem resolution. 

Taking CC-NOC's asset discovery to the next level, the new Network Topology Map feature builds and displays an overall topology of the network, including traffic paths between other points on the network and external networks. The CC-NOC map also highlights network availability and outages.

Satisfying custom reporting requirements in the areas of availability, event, performance and inventory data of hardware and software, CC-NOC's Open Data Framework makes the CC-NOC database accessible to third-party
applications. Using ODB-compliant software, such as Crystal reports, customers can now query CC-NOC's database and generate their own custom reports.

Event Correlation, another new 6.0 feature, automatically determines the root cause and type of incident based on the network topology. It saves time diagnosing incidents and problems by eliminating excessive notifications -- enabling administrators to get to the core of the problem. For example, if a network router goes down, administrators will receive one notification for a network outage, rather than numerous individual notifications for each server behind that router. 

"CommandCenter NOC is the first turnkey IT operations management system providing this breath of functionality to the midmarket delivered in a virtual appliance," said James Cerwinski, Senior Product Manager at Raritan. "It combines the delivery advantages of a software product with the ease of deployment and use found in an appliance, so that more midsized IT organizations can take full advantage of our award-winning network and systems monitoring system."

MediClick uses CC-NOC Virtual Appliance to maintain healthy IT infrastructure    

MediClick, a software-as-a-service solution provider for the healthcare industry, wanted to do more to protect its IT infrastructure without increasing its IT budget.    

MediClick's Network Engineer Jamie Starling -- based in Raleigh, N.C. -- was impressed with the breadth of capabilities in CC-NOC and its integrated dashboard interface. "I don't know of any other solution that has all these features," said Starling. "It was painless to deploy. We followed the on-screen directions and we were collecting information on our IT infrastructure within minutes." Starling deployed the CC-NOC 250 Virtual Appliance leveraging existing hardware and VMware Server edition.

CC-NOC monitors the company's 80 desktops, three switches and 35 servers supporting the production site for MediClick's flagship ProClick Web-based materials management and financial applications used by hospitals -- and the company's e-mail, files, applications and databases. 

"CC-NOC is supporting us in multiple dimensions -- from intrusion detection to scanning for vulnerabilities; as well as giving us visibility all the way down to end users, so that we can see what they are loading on their PCs and what Web sites they visit," said Starling. "By tapping the data that CC-NOC captures, it has saved us time in developing reports and in keeping tabs on our hardware and software inventory throughout the company. If there's a problem, CC-NOC will let us know about it, so that we can address it before it affects service."