Raritan Rounds Out CommandCenter NOC Series

On Feb. 27, Raritan, Somerset, N.J., began shipping three new network monitoring appliances—the CommandCenter NOC 100, NOC 250 and NOC 2500. Parked on a customer’s primary IP network, the appliances can identify, monitor and issue policy-based alerts from every server, workstation and router on the network, Marc Schweig, vice president of business development, said.

“You plug [CommandCenter NOC] in, then let it run a couple of days while it finds network devices, and in the course of a week you pretty much have a miniature operations center monitoring 10 to hundreds of servers,” he said.

Raritan added the NOC (network operations center) products to complement its existing line of CommandCenter SG (secure gateway) appliances, Schweig said. The SG products manage Raritan’s Dominion and Paragon appliances, which provide out-of-band device recovery and management using a secondary KVM-based network. Raritan did not have a product that alerted administrators to the problems that required remediation. The CommandCenter NOC line fills this vacuum, he said.

At price points that range from $5,995 for the NOC 100 to $11,995 for the NOC 2500, the new Raritan appliances are less expensive than many competing network monitoring and alerting solutions such as BMC Software’s Remedy product, Schweig said.

However, Raritan is not necessarily looking to displace Remedy deployments with CommandCenter NOC, Schweig said. Instead, Raritan wants to add new partners who preferably are BMC resellers with customers who can’t afford Remedy, he said.

“The perfect new partner for us would be someone who would be a BMC reseller with a host of midsize customers they can’t sell [Remedy] because it’s too bloody expensive,” Schweig said.

As for resellers who have customers already running Remedy or some other monitoring and alert product, Raritan would like to see them sell the SG, Dominion and Paragon out-of-band products to those customers, Schweig said. “I wouldn’t say ‘Look out BMC, here comes [NOC].’ I’d say we are looking to provide BMC customers with the functionality of SG,” he said.

Michael Allen, national director of services at En Pointe Technologies, a solution provider in El Segundo, Calif., which brings in about $50 million per year in services revenue, said En Pointe is close to signing with Raritan as a partner. The appeal of Raritan would not be as great without the arrival of the NOC products to complement Raritan’s out-of-band products with monitoring tools, he said.

The browser-accessible nature of Raritan’s products means En Pointe will be able to use them in a remote monitoring and remediation fashion as part of its MSP offerings, Allen said. One drawback, however, is the limited scalability of Raritan’s NOC appliances, which, according to Raritan, have a ceiling of about 250 Microsoft servers and 250 network devices.

“Scalability is where we need to be very flexible, without having to add more and more devices,” Allen said.

Raritan, which does about 95 percent of its business through some 400 solution providers worldwide, offers top partners sales margins up to 40 percent.