The VitalQIP Appliance Manager (AM) is a 1U box that packages the vendor's VitalQIP IP address management technology, including DHCP and BIND 9 based DNS services. VitalQIP AM appliances can be deployed in multiple locations (including remote location) and centrally managed using the vendor's VitalQIP Appliance Management Software (AMS).

The appliances themselves house the vendors DHCP and DNS services (as well as SNMP and NTP), running over a hardened Red Hat Linux OS. The vendor states that the appliances have limited port access, and can be accessed only as granted via the AMS administrator. Communications between AMS and the remote appliances are protected via a secret key exchange between the two.

Each appliance itself has a Web-based GUI facilitating the application of patches/upgrades as well as the monitoring of its running services; and the AMS software itself can be launched from within this Web-based GUI. AMS tracks the current inventory of each appliance, and allows for the configuration of individual services before they (the services) are actually deployed to the appliances.

Within AMS, an administrator can start or stop remote services, reboot a remote appliance or take it offline, access remote log and configuration file, monitor the health of the remote appliances, deploy service upgrades to the remote appliance, and more. AMS maintains a record of upgrades to each appliance, and additionally allows for the rollback of services to a previous version.

VitalQIP Appliance Manager is offered in two flavors: The AMM (Appliance Management Module) 1000, with a single Intel DualCore processor; and the AMM 5000, with dual power supplies, RAID 1 protected drives, and dual, NEBS compliant Intel Xeon DualCore processors. Both are 1U. Performance-wise, the vendor states that the 1000 is capable of 3,258 DHCP leases per second and 43,225 DNS queries per second; while the 5000 supports 6,455 DHCP leases per second and 93,850 DNS queries per second.

Contact the vendor for further information.