Hello,
I work for a company that provides IT consulting and management for a wide array of customers. This includes, servers, and network equipment. The challenge we are faced with now, is coming up with a scalable way to backup all the network equipment of our customers. This consits of a wide selection of equipment from various vendors, Cisco, Fortigate, HP, Bluecoat, Juniper, Checkpoint you name it.
Currently we are using Kiwi CAT tools but this means that we have to have direct access from the server runnnig cat tools to every network equipment. The way we have it setup right now, is that we have VPNs established from our firewall, to the firewall in the HQ of the customers, which vary widely in their size. Some just have one building, some span multiple continents and have thousands of employees. However we don't have direct reachability to the nether regions of each customers MPLS , and building them and proper firewall rules and maintaining them promises to be a despicable task, especially so when you have to take into account the massive ammounts of NAT trickery needed to deal with the issue of overlapping subnets. Indeed some remote offices have just an lowly internet connection with a DHCP issued public address and we use IPSEC tunnels to connect these. So I wanted to know if there is a tool, that has a central management point, and then agents installed into each customer's infrastructure, that backup the devices in that customer's network, and then report to the central console. Reachability between all hosts is not a problem to arrange within just one network.
For example this is how Microsoft's SCOM works, there are central management servers, and gateways in each network. The gateways gather the information from the agents running on the servers and then report back to the management console. In this way we would be using the agents as a stepping stone and our task would be significantly reduced.
Any help would be appreciated.
Paul