OverDrive extends the power and dynamic capabilities of the virtualized datacenter to the network infrastructure by creating a network environment that is fluid and responsive. OverDrive is a powerful software network virtualization solution that automates and orchestrates end-to-end service delivery by abstracting and virtualizing discreet network services in response to changes occurring to dynamic resources (users, applications, virtual compute, physical compute or storage). As resources are moved or changed, OverDrive automatically modifies and changes the underlying network device configurations in order to maintain defined access and security models that are persisted by business policy.

Components of the OverDrive network virtualization solution include:

• Control Center that defines, controls and manages all services
• Network Virtualization Engine that transforms policies into actionable service directives
• Device Service Controllers (DSC) to manage the device-level configurations across the deployed network.

OverDrive Control Center

Network engineers and IT personnel use the intuitive web-based OverDrive Control Center to create policies that define the relationship between users, applications, virtual/physical compute and storage resources using everyday business semantics. These policies control and manage device-level configurations and services deployed in the network. Policies can be defined at a very granular level allowing for the mass-customization of infrastructure services tailored to unique requirements. The portal also provides a centralized, multi-level view of the real-time status of deployed policies across the service deliver model including full audit trails and customized reports.

OverDrive Network Virtualization Engine

The OverDrive Network Virtualization Engine’s primary function is to virtualize network services so that it can transform the network into a dynamic fluid environment. During initial deployment, OverDrive auto-discovers and abstracts discreet device-level configurations and services from the deployed network and builds a centralized services catalog.

Once created, policies are interpreted and deconstructed in the OverDrive Network Virtualization Engine into actionable service directives that are pushed out across a secure communications plane to deployed OverDrive Device Service Controllers (DSCs). The DSCs then take these directives coming from the OverDrive Engine and create actual configuration syntax for the type/model of device they support. This process is fully automated and capable of building and deploying the most complex network services, access and security delivery models, in real-time, without manual intervention.

Without OverDrive a single request to move a critical application to a new physical or virtual location could easily require hundreds of separate device-level configuration updates including changes to routing protocols and services, VPN settings, VLAN configurations, firewall settings and ACL settings across the entire infrastructure. All of these changes could take weeks or even months to investigate, identify and implement across a fully deployed network or data center - with OverDrive the entire process takes seconds.

Most importantly, the OverDrive policy that generated these changes and governs the behaviors of the network remains persisted in OverDrive and any future changes to the resources managed by this policy will automatically initiate a reconfiguration to ensure the access and security models initially defined remain in effect. This ensures the deployed network environment is always in compliance and every change is fully logged for auditing. With OverDrive, audit and compliance reporting for SOX, HIPAA and PCI-DSS is as easy as a single keystroke.

The OverDrive Network Virtualization solution is available in two configurations: enterprise and service provider.

Device Service Controller

The OverDrive Device Service Controller (DSC) is software that interacts directly with the deployed network device using standard network protocols and interfaces such as SNMP v1.0, SNMP v3.0 and secure CLI. The DSC takes the directives that comes from the OverDrive Network Virtualization engine and translates them into actual device level syntax based on the device manufacturer and model. The DSC also continually monitors the network devices and services to ensure that OverDrive persisted policies remain in effect and are not impacted by new policies or manual changes to device configurations outside of the OverDrive solution.

The DSC software is shipped on a pre-configured network rack-based appliance or it can run on existing data center hardware, virtual machines or directly on network devices.