Remember Enterasys? That's right, the old Cabletron Company that got swallowed into Siemens Enterprise and went quiet for a while. Yesterday Enterasys released a rather unique addition to their product line with project "Isaac".
In addition to being a great bartender on the Love Boat, Isaac allows organizations to manage their network infrastructure through the following social media tools: Twitter, Salesforce Chatter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Isaac uses the various social media interfaces to send and receive messages to Enterasys routers, switches and wireless infrastructure. It's worth noting that it doesn't just send over syslog and CLI responses; instead it converts messages to natural language, making it easier to understand. From what Enterasys told me, any network management or configuration function that could be done directly on the network device could be done through the social media interface. Initially Isaac will be used to manage Enterasys network devices, but the company has plans to broaden it to support products from other network infrastructure vendors.
The strategy makes sense for Enterasys as a Siemens company because of the strong focus Siemens Enterprise has had on social media over the past two years. In many ways it ties Enterasys to Siemens in a way that's better than any before.
One of the most obvious concerns with the social media interface is security. Twitter and Facebook don’t exactly scream, "Security", but Enterasys did address this. Isaac is secured through the following means:
Authentication. It leverages the social media account username and password. Additionally organizations can choose to use two factor authentication.
Authorization. Only users that have been invited and approved can follow or friend Isaac. Followers can be designated as read-only or read-write depending on their role.
Auditing. Full auditing and tracking capabilities. Isaac also has the ability to block users.
Encryption. Uses https/SSL encryption for transport security.
After seeing this, I'm fully confident that the security means are there to make this a secure way of managing network infrastructure. In many ways, it's more secure than traditional network management.
As a former hard-core network engineer that lived and died by CLI and homegrown scripts to manage network equipment, my first reaction was that this was cute but nothing that any serious network engineer would use. Real men use CLIs!! To be honest, my first reaction in my head was "Twitter to manage a router?? Are you freaking nuts??" I managed to translate that question in real time to something a little more constructive.
As the briefing went on though, I did start to change my mind and I can see the potential for the following reasons:
* Generational influence. Back in the day, I was one of the first network engineers I know to have the network infrastructure contact me through e-mail. Some thought that was crazy but I grew up with e-mail. I first started using Internet e-mail (elm) in 1984, so it was just natural to me. For the current group of administrators starting their career, they don’t use e-mail. They live in Facebook and Twitter the same way I lived in e-mail most of my life, so it stands to reason that this generation would want to use this as a part of their job.
* Not everyone is a hard-core engineer that likes CLIs. To me, the CLI driven engineer that looks down upon alternative ways of accomplishing tasks is akin to the hard core C++ developer that looked down on the Visual programming languages (this was also me). Inevitably, the easier way of doing things won out. Occam’s Razor states when there are multiple solutions to a problem, the simplest one is generally correct. So as much as I liked the voodoo and mystery around being a "CLI guy", using natural language through a social interface has got to be easier than remembering something like "run cuc sysagent task cleandeletedmessagestask".
* Creates ubiquitous access to network infrastructure. Being able to perform these tasks through social media means network mangers can now use any smart phone, tablet or PC to monitor and administer the network.
Initially I do expect that there will be resistance to what Enterasys is proposing, in verticals like financial services and telecom where the network engineers are highly paid CCIEs and have developed many custom scripts and tools to operate the network.
Isaac should have appeal to organizations where you have a network team that is small relative to other verticals, or where you have engineers that like to experiment. Retail, K-12 and higher education come to mind, which happens to be some of the verticals that Enterasys has managed to maintain some mindshare with.
Will the ability to "Friend" and "Tweet" your network be the thing that causes the mighty Cisco to fall to Enterasys? Hardly. But it is an interesting approach that no one else is taking to networking. Again, I think the appeal will be limited to a handful of verticals, but from where Enterasys has been, limited appeal is better than what they've had over the past five years.
