In Hanover on 12th of January a workshop took place between the partners of ESUKOM and the network manufacturer Infoblox from the USA. Infoblox has established the first IF-MAP server on the market and is very interested in the research activities of the consortium of ESUKOM. Therefore Infoblox is a cooperation partner of the project from the beginning. Goal of the workshop was the presentation of the ESUKOM project and to get an impression of the development and products of Infoblox. After all the participations discussed the further cooperation possibilities for a closer work in the future.
Infoblox with headquarter in Santa Clara, California, has own close contacts to universities in the States. They develop products and also open source software partly. Beside DNS and DHCP servers, Infoblox is a specialist for its new IF-MAP server. For the company IF-MAP is a central solution approach for the simplification of different monitoring protocols (e.g. SNMP, netflow, syslog). Therefore the approach of ESUKOM is very interesting for Infoblox, because on the one hand IF-MAP can be used for consolidation and on the other hand for correlation of log-data. The publication of such meta-data is relative simple, but the composition and analysis is very difficult to handle.
The project ESUKOM works on the requirement analysis actually, which has been given from the definition of the different user scenarios. These different scenarios, which were derived from real projects of the company partners, were presented and discussed with Infoblox. Hereby the interest for the coverage of smartphones was very high, because there are no sufficient solutions from the provider available. That is the reason, why in the U.S. new companies were founded to offer secure mobile services for the professional smartphone usage.
Furthermore Infoblox is interested in to publish and distribute IF-MAP. Therefore the portal website www.if-map.com has been established. On this website solutions of different vendors should be present. Currently eight vendors are available. Additionally the IETF has recognised the importance of IF-MAP and will define a RFC standard. But on the way to establish IF-MAP on the market there are some obstacles available. For example, this technique was not perceived by the end-user and the manufacturers are not using IF-MAP or implement it very slow in their components. The portal website should help to solve these problems and generate a better understanding. Therefore ESUKOM will linked their website with IF-MAP.COM and will establish an own portal site www.if-map.de. On the website of ESUKOM it will give more information about IF-MAP in the near future, incl. implementation examples. As a common cooperation task both parties want to test their developments regarding interoperability. Additionally both parties want to keep in contact regarding the development of IF-MAP solutions continuously, to get the best benefit. That is also a goal with the other cooperation partners.
