In my organization, we had 130,000 network devices that needed to be brought into the solution and mapped. NetBrain can handle the scale but the engineers that manage those devices have to go in and update all of them to allow NetBrain permission to poll them.

It can get a little stressful for everybody when you're trying to roll out new stuff when you've got other issues that have to be addressed with other devices. In some cases, our devices had no automation at all. 

One example is the Cisco 3650. Right now, if you went through the inventory list, you see that we have different versions running. Some are on one version, whereas others are on another version. The problem with upgrading them is that they need to be done overnight because we don't want to disrupt any network traffic during business hours. Consequently, it could take us years to upgrade the versions before we can even get them onto these new tools.

This may be an internal issue but it's a big one when you have a lot of devices. Even if you had 10,000 devices, it's still an issue. You have to consider the compatibility of the device against the tool, and being able to use certain commands to upgrade it.

We initially bought 250 nodes. We added another 120 some nodes so we need to up our license count because we're nowhere near pushing scalability. I mean, we're a decent sized enterprise, but we've got a magnitude of 500 total individual switches and a total of 150, 200 nodes at the time. Scalability hasn't been a problem. 

None. Build it right from the beginning.

The scalability is good. It's based on the number of IP addresses. The license is based on 500,000 IP addresses. Unless you're within the limit of that range, you're fine.

The installed or enterprise version scaled pretty nicely. The Consulting Edition, I'm not sure. The licensing seems a little expensive, so sending out multiple systems for utilization seems problematic.

The solution is very simple to scale.