Network management vendor SolarWinds has today upgraded its Orion network performance and troubleshooting package.

The upgrade, which takes the package to version 9.0, will give "firms the ability to support large, distributed networks which have devices, not normally encountered in standard networks," said SolarWinds chief product strategist Kenny Van Zant.

To address global network device management, SolarWinds has launched a separate module called the 'Enterprise Operations Console' (EOC) to provide an overarching management tier for firms' separate worldwide Orion deployments. " The EOC allows top-level network managers to deploy data taken over WAN links from multiple Orion management deployments - all on a centralised system. So if I'm a big multinational I could take network device data from all my Orion deployments at different sites globally, and display that data on one single console," added Van Zant.

As well as very large enterprises, Van Zant said that Managed Service Providers (MSPs) could also benefit from such a system which would allow them to display and monitor data from all their hosted customers simultaneously in real-time.

To address non-standard network devices, Van Zant said that SolarWinds had developed what it called a universal device poller, a feature which he said could be used to manage network kit with unique properties. "Typically out-of-the-box we support managing thousands of devices through simple network management protocol (SNMP) management information bases (MIBs). However, the larger a network gets, the more likely network managers are to run into a device where they need a point-and-click tool to process custom MIBs," said Van Zant.

For example, said Van Zant, you could have a custom power monitoring device or unique point of sale system which you need to deal with and which has custom management properties, "With our universal device poller, network managers can simply point-and-click to directly process those properties."

Orion uses a Windows SQL Server database to store polled data, but currently does not support Windows Server 2008 environments - "We're not seeing demand from customers yet for Server 2008 support, but we'll be putting support in a later Orion release," added Van Zant.