When you use AutoNOC as your backbone, you are not locked in to one vendor scheme or another. You get the flexibility to pick and choose the hardware and software you like. That is even true in terms of the actual AutoNOC implementation!

Choose AutoNOC for Linux or AutoNOC for Windows
We offer natively compiled high performance versions of AutoNOC for both Linux and Windows.

The requirements for AutoNOC 2.1 for Linux:

• Any LSB Linux
• Minimum 5 Gigs of HD Space
• Minimum 128 megs of RAM (512 or More Recommended)
• Minimum 400 mghtz Pentium III (1Ghz+, 2 CPUs Better)
• 2 or 3 Button Mouse
• VGA Graphics Card

The requirements for AutoNOC 2.1 for Windows:

• Windows NT / 2000 / XP Server*
• Service Pack 3 (Windows 2000)
• Internet Explorer 4.0+ Installed
• Minimum 5 Gigs of HD Space
• Minimum 128 megs of RAM (512 or More Recommended)
• Minimum 400 mghtz Pentium III (1Ghz+, 2 CPUs Better)
• 2 or 3 Button Mouse
• VGA Graphics Card

Multi-Protocol Management
AutoNOC is a multi-protocol manager. It is able to use SNMP as well as an array of other protocols to acquire information about the network and availability of services as the following diagram indicates.

In order to access devices, a bare minimum of ICMP (Ping) needs to be available on the network. The best results are attained when many of AutoNOC's supported protocols are available.

Bandwidth Considerations
A big concern for people who use and deploy operations management solutions is the question of how much bandwidth is used. This is an important question. We approach this concern in much the same way as the military approaches submarine warfare. You can run AutoNOC in either passive or active mode. You can also run it using some mix of the two.

In passive mode, AutoNOC purely works as a listener for network events. By directing events passively, network bandwidth is only used when an event actually occurs. This is very efficient, but the downside to passive mode, as is true in submarine warfare, is that the sender of events has to be functioning in order to know there is a problem!

In active mode, AutoNOC additionally goes out and tests systems, polls performance data, builds historical models, etc. It uses some bandwidth to do this, but that is often fairly minimal. AutoNOC also gives you the ability to control device polling intervals and set the maximum amount of bandwidth that can be used when monitoring the network.

The general idea here is that the more bandwidth you use, the more high resolution and the better the quality the data. We simply deliver the features that make it easy for you to decide how passive or how active you want to be.

One additional advantage of AutoNOC is the distributed peer-to-peer scalability which allows you to put portals on local LANs where the networks often are 100Mbps or faster! You then link the portals over the WAN which uses very little bandwidth. Because local LAN networks often have so much more bandwidth than WAN connections, this often eliminates the bandwidth issue altogether!
 

* Workstation and professional versions of Windows to allow only 5 backlogged port connections, as such customers will need to purchase a server version of Windows for production use of AutoNOC. The Linux release of AutoNOC is not subject to this limit.