Originally designed to meet the stringent demands of tactical and enterprise deployments for the U.S. DoD, the National Guard, and state and local emergency responders, IQ-Core NCM provides the following field-proven, key benefits:
- Technology optimized for the tactical network
- A unified view
- Adaptable to user level
- Drives down costs
- Enhances ability to meet mission objectives
- Vendor-agnostic interoperability
Transcript
I'm Charlie Kawasaki, chief technical officer of PacStar (a business unit of Curtiss-Wright). My goal is to share with you the power and benefits of IQ-Core Network Communications Manager or NCM designed to revolutionize tactical network management.
The military is aggressively modernizing its communications networks to achieve and maintain overmatch. As part of this, tactical networking programs face intense pressure to deploy cutting-edge best-of-breed technologies. This results in operators confronted with multiple vendor user interfaces requiring extensive training time and leading to complex and error-prone configuration, long setup times, and high downtime. IQ-Core NCM overcomes tactical network complexity, automating a wide range of functions: reducing configuration errors, simplifying troubleshooting, saving time, and providing cyber situational awareness.
IQ-Core NCM includes a broad array of capabilities combined into one integrated intuitive user interface and can replace multitudes of individual network management tools. IQ-Core NCM enables mission success by managing a wide array of popular DoD communications devices including routers, switches, firewalls, gateways, voice systems, virtual machines, wireless systems, and more. It further enables mission success by automating both routine and complex tasks using wizards that control multiple devices from multiple vendors, providing roles-based access control with a tailorable user interface, providing configuration management, event management, and user management, and including a set of powerful utilities and troubleshooting tools.
Let's take a quick tour of some of IQ-Core NCM's main features that make it a powerful tool for operators to manage nodes in the field. It includes customizable views with an array of device status indicators, widgets and link status indicators. This can be customized for different mission sets. It also includes a separate dashboard mode designed for operators without IT training. This is great for vehicle networks, where warfighters need to see the network status but typically do not have the specialized skills to manage a network themselves.
IQ-Core NCM manages both hardware and software devices and uses the same user interface regardless of the device type, reducing training requirements. Device management includes customizable status and alerts from SNMP and other monitoring sources as well as interface status and configuration and real-time link performance. It also provides direct access to the command-line interface for devices for advanced administrators.
IQ-Core NCM automates configuration management through its backup and restore functions. Backups can be scheduled to run manually and are also completed automatically when IQ-Core NCM detects a device configuration change. It makes it easy to compare differences in configurations vastly simplifying troubleshooting.
IQ-Core NCM makes provisioning users and phones simple. You can add users and assign phones all in one wizard or in bulk.
It includes the ability to provision UC systems, also known as voice, SIP or session controllers. It manages popular tactical UC systems including Redcom Sigma, Redcom TDM solutions, Cisco unified communications manager, and Cisco unified communications manager express. IQ-Core NCM makes it easy to manage Vmware ESXI virtual machines as well. You can monitor, start and stop VMs, and create and restore snapshots.
Another one of many useful capabilities is the event management system. It collects events including syslog and SNMP traps as well as many events generated by our own monitoring. The event manager includes the ability to filter events, search, create custom queries, and custom alerts. This capability provides SIEM functionality without requiring a separate application.
IQ-Core NCM is field-proven and works in conjunction with IQ-Core Remote Operations and Management (ROAM) and IQ-Core Crypto Manager (CM) automating many security, remote management, configuration management, and monitoring tasks not shown here.
To learn more about how IQ-Core software can benefit your organization, you can find information on PacStar's website including data sheets and white papers. You can also request a discussion with one of our experts or ask for a free evaluation copyright from our website. We think you'll quickly discover why we say IQ-Core software enables warfighters to fight the battle and not the network.