Belkin offers centralized management to SMBs 14 August, 2009 By Chris Talbot

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The 5000HQ appliance was designed to fill a gap Belkin saw in the market, said Dawnmarie Martin, channel marketing manager at Belkin. For such centralized management of servers and other IP devices on the network, SMBs have to look to pricey, enterprise-class products that have additional features they don't need, she said.

A typical use case would be a medium-sized business with a central datacenter and a few remote offices, said Mauricio Chacon, product manager at Belkin. IT administrators want to be able to access multiple devices, servers and switches, and they're faced with the challenge of trying to remember all of the IP addresses for individual devices throughout the environment, he said.

"These solutions are geared towards growing businesses that are confronted with the problems of increasingly complex IT," Chacon said. "They have multiple IT infrastructures distributed across multiple locations, so they have remote sites across the country and they're finding it very difficult to manage them."

The OmniView product line, which includes the new 5000HQ, the OmniViewIP KVM/IP Switches and the OmniViewIP Serial Console Servers, was developed to help simplify the management of IT resources, he said.

The 5000HQ appliance has the ability to talk to multiple devices, both Belkin and third-party products, and it's essentially the central piece of the OmniView line.

"The main piece that's talking to all these devices is the OmniView HQ," Chacon said.

Providing users with centralized access and management through an easy-to-use interface, the 5000HQ enables administrators to management account and device access privileges, establish rights, manage devices by sorting by location and name, and do remote power management.

Since it's an appliance instead of a piece of software sitting on a server, administrators can also watch a server boot up from the centralized management console, enabling them to deal with BIOS issues from the interface.

"It provides you that centralized access where you have everything seen through one pane of glass, one view," Chacon said.

Belkin also tried to keep SMB IT budgets in mind when developing the product. The intent was to offer a low cost of ownership to customers, he said. Customers don't need to purchase additional licences as they scale, for instance. It also offers 128-bit AES encryption.

For the channel, this is a good fit since most of them are already working with SMB customers -- and many SMBs are struggling with the lack of centralized management, Martin said.

"Most of our channel partners are servicing the mid-market, small and medium business. We know that they have a number of end-users that are suffering these kinds of headaches. They have all these different kinds of products that need to be managed," Martin said.

Available on Aug. 20th, the OmniViewIP 5000HQ Centralized Management Appliance will carry a list price of $3,399.