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Device42 History and Milestones: Celebrating 5 Years Since Release

[responsive]Device42 Celebrates 5 years and 134 Releases[/responsive]
[separator headline=”h1″ title=”Device42 History: Inception”]

The Device42 team is celebrating the 5 year anniversary of the initial release of Device42. The last half decade has been a fun journey as the product has hit a number of significant developmental milestones.  Many of you will remember these key milestones personally, and others who have joined recently can learn a bit about our history as we retell our story in this blog post.  And of course all of you can expect many more exciting developments to come.

Device42 came to be during a week our Founder and CEO Raj Jalan will never forget – A week, in fact, many of us still remember well. It was the week Hurricane Irene made landfall in the US.

At the time, Raj was consulting for a company that had two data centers configured to meet their 100% up-time SLA to their customers.  One was outfitted with generators and could operate without power for two days; the other, a mere two hours. The thinking was that the chances of losing both at the same were slim to none, and that they would make it through any disaster scenario.

That’s when they found out that the generator-backed data center — the one they were counting on in a worst-case scenario — was in the midst of roof work, and that roof work had to be stopped due to the imminent hurricane. The building manager broke the somber news that the data center would likely take on water if the storm was severe enough…  Just what they didn’t need to hear three days before the hurricane was due to land.

The only way to maintain the 100% uptime SLA was to build a new datacenter, from the ground up, in those three days. They called every colo and hosting provider under the sun, and believe it or not actually found one that could deliver the hardware in just a few hours, making the new datacenter project a reality.

The team worked tirelessly, provisioned all the servers, storage, operating systems, applications, etc. In a feat of human determination, a mere two hours before Hurricane Irene made landfall, they were ready to make the cutover; and they did.

50% of the applications didn’t come up. They had done the best they could, duplicating and provisioning hardware for each and every customer, server, and application they knew existed.

Why?  Specific issues and one-off problems aside, the vast majority of the applications that didn’t come up were simply not documented or the documentation was out of date.

Raj knew there had to be a better way. There needed to exist a product that documented the datacenter without requiring continuous manual updates. The datacenter itself, top to bottom, and all the applications that it hosts – A “Self-documenting and self-updating CMDB” – A single source of truth, done right.  After not finding anything suitable on the market, Raj set out to tackle this problem himself. He wrote the first lines of code for what would later become — or looking back, what was first released five years ago – Device42: A self-documenting CMDB that would break new ground and eliminate the cause of a lot of the hair-pulling we’ve all experienced. Affordable CMDB software … That works!

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July 2, 2011

Our first official non-beta release, realizing the vision of an integrated DCIM plus IPAM product… And our first logo – showing off our ability to … quickly cut and paste:)

[responsive]Device42's original shining logo[/responsive]

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February 2012

Putting the Auto in Discovery

Using DNS and SNMP, clients are able to automatically discover devices and their IPs, providing a key piece of the Device42 vision.

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March 2012

Application dependency mapping is announced!

[responsive]Minecraft Map[/responsive]

Users can now see what applications are running on what servers as well as device to device dependencies

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May 2012

Password Management is added. A snippet from the release notes: “Starting with release 2.4.2, you can now use Device42 appliance to centrally manage your passwords with granular access control per password.”

Now, when browsing a server, its credentials are at your fingertips!

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July 2012

Device42 becomes powerfully punny with the addition of our Power Module

[responsive]He-Man Power-up![/responsive]

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September 2012

The beginnings of our API. Read APIs introduced. Later we would announce our REST APIs.

[responsive]Rest API[/responsive]

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December 2012

Patch panel and Cable Management are added. Nobody likes tracing cables… Well, except for Raj. He oddly finds it relaxing — but that’s another story.

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January 2013

Seeing is believing: visualization is added to the room layout view

[responsive]Visualization in the Device42 Room Layout View[/responsive]

(…and its come a long way since!)

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November 2013

Device42.com goes mobile. Users are now able to view their rack layouts on their phones or tablets. QR code inventory management is also released this month, allowing user to use that same phone to manage their inventory (no special barcode readers necessary!).

[responsive]Old mobile phone[/responsive]

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February 2014

Device42 wins most promising software product at Connecticut Innovation Summit. Here are cofounders Raj and Steve accepting the award

[responsive]Raj and Steve accept award for "Most Promising Software Product" at Connecticut Innovation Summit 2014[/responsive]

Also in February, the Cloud Auto-Discovery functionality was added, as well as the spare parts management module.

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May 2014

Gartner thinks we are cool. Device42 named one of the cool vendors in their 2014 report.

[responsive]Full House's Michelle "cool"![/responsive]

And since we are cool, we also added Blade Auto-Discovery in May, as well. And that’s not all; in proving just how hip we are, we went on to revamp our API documentation @ https://api.device42.com … check it out.

Coolness level: 11

…but we didn’t stop there, either.  May 2014 was a busy month for us, and we released PDU Connectivity visualization as well!

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June 2014

Device42 is translated into its first (of 9, and counting) foreign languages. Both the software and the website go live in Chinese.

[responsive]Rosetta Stone[/responsive]

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July 2014

Telco circuit management is added.

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November 2014

Device42 gets a Power-Up with the release of the Power Autodiscovery and Monitoring Module, offering auto-discovery, monitoring and control of popular SNMP and ModBus enabled PDUs.

[responsive]Power UP![/responsive]

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January 2015

Rack connectivity drag and drop is added, as well as new zoom options in the room layout view.

[responsive]Windows Drag and Drop Comic[/responsive]

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Feb 2015

A big one: Service Discovery is added.

[responsive]A Big "1"![/responsive]

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May 2015

Here comes the Software License Management module – what software, what version, how many licenses, who has em–no problem

[responsive]License Compliance Illustration[/responsive]

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[responsive]Almost half way done reading[/responsive]

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July 2015

The month of integrations! Puppet, Chef, Servicenow, and Jira integrations all released. You got it, we’re integrating with it!

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October 2015

Device42 moves to a bigger boat, and adds F5 Support to boot.

[responsive]You're gonna need a bigger boat![/responsive]

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November 2015

Device42 forces smiles for trade shows! And we have a lot to smile about, with our first 64bit image being released!

[responsive]Device42 Chris at the trade show[/responsive]

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December 2015

Multitenancy released.

[responsive]multitenant.jpg[/responsive]

[responsive]Device42 Multi-tenancy example[/responsive]

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February 2016

Device42 takes Israel

[responsive]Device42 in Israel[/responsive]

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March 2016

Device42 now has customers in 34 countries!

[responsive]Small World? Not Exactly![/responsive]

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April 2016

Our RunDeck integration is released!

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May 2016

SSL Certificate Management is released – When it’s expiring, where it’s hiding, did I miss one? Device42 helps keep your customers from ever being scared off by a certificate expiration page from one of your servers.

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June 2016

…Something big is coming. Say no to the dark side.

[responsive]darth vader.jpg[/responsive]

Deep Application Mapping is upon us with the release of the services module. Relationships are now mapped in more detail than ever with a near complete revamp of the module.

This is a very important Device42 milestone, as it really brings the whole of Device42’s initial vision of a fully automated CMDB that much closer to reality. Device42 now, using the force (only for good), discovers service-to-service mappings, which can show which service on a machine is connected to what service on another machine. It also provides the ability to automatically group application components based on like services on a server; for example, when Device42 discovers a group of Oracle services running on a machine, those services are automatically grouped together as an “Oracle application”.

To tie it all together, the configuration data for major applications like Oracle, Microsoft SQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Cold Fusion, IIS, and Apache is now also discovered and is visible from right within Device42, which means one more reason to stay away from the dark side (actually log onto your production servers).

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July 2016 – We turn 5! We celebrate with our 134th release, v10.2.1

[responsive]5th Birthday[/responsive]

So, there’s that.  And the addition of web-hooks for automation workflows, which are poised at the ready to revolutionize Device42’s ability to assist in …

[responsive]Automating All The Things![/responsive]

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[separator headline=”h2″ title=”The FUTURE“]

There’s a lot more on the Horizon, too, loyal D42 fans. We are super excited about finishing up the web-hooks part soon so you can automate your workflows with Device42. DCIM enhancements-a-plenty are coming, as well as the ability to selectively enable auto-deletion of records.

Two factor auth is on the way, as is support for SAN storage network discovery … and as always, more integrations, as well.

As always, we’re ears-wide-open and would love to hear from YOU with regards to which integrations you’d like to see next, and what features would benefit you the most.

So leave a comment, give us a call, write an e-mail  send a letter! We’d love to hear from you!

…and of course, help us celebrate by making your life a bit easier, too — download Device42 to see for yourself just how far we’ve come!

 [responsive]Device42 logo evolution[/responsive]

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Take Device42 for a free test drive today.

Download a free trial of Device42 and the Device42 Auto Discovery Software today!

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