NetBox Labs is out today with a new version of its network automation platform, tailored to meet the needs of on-premises enterprise deployments.

NetBox Labs was spun out from NS1 in 2023 as that company was being acquired by IBM. The company raised $20 million in April 2023, in an effort to build out the capabilities of the Netbox open-source network automation platform. Until now, Netbox has existed as a self-hosted option for those who just want to download and run the open-source code and as a cloud-managed service. That's now changing with the debut of NetBox Enterprise, which enables organizations to run a fully supported version of NetBox on-premises, including some additional enterprise integration capabilities that users of the cloud version already have.

NetBox is used by tens of thousands of organizations worldwide to document, model, and automate their networks. However, many large enterprises require a supported on-premises version to rely on for their critical production infrastructure.

“There's a ton of at-scale, adoption and production deployment of the open-source NetBox in major enterprises,” Kris Beevers, CEO of NetBox Labs, told SDxCentral. “A lot of these enterprises are prevented on a policy basis or a regulatory basis from deploying critical network infrastructure and services in the cloud; they need it to be in their environments.”

How NetBox Enterprise automates network management

NetBox Enterprise helps enable network automation through its comprehensive network data model and integrations with automation tools.

At the foundation of NetBox is the technology's data model.

“If you really distill NetBox down to the most basic description of what it is, it's a relational data model for all the resources of that network and how they're connected and configured,” Beever said. “So  it's a database, but it's a very purpose-built database that captures the real world topology and characteristics of an enterprise network.”

Key aspects of the NetBox data model include enforcing consistency with how networks are actually built and operated in the real world. This reduces errors in network configurations. NetBox can interact with infrastructure as code tools, such as Terraform, to help drive changes. Beevers explained that organizations use Terraform to connect to a router and publish new configurations. To enact the change, Terraform can draw all the information for the router's configuration from the data model in NetBox.

With NetBox Enterprise, there are now also a series of integrations that cater to the needs of large-scale enterprises. One such integration mentioned by Beevers is with ServiceNow, which is a widely used IT service management and operations platform.

NetBox Enterprise gives admins 'one throat to choke'

While many enterprises are already running NetBox on their own, the availability of an enterprise-supported version of NetBox gives organizations the proverbial 'throat to choke' when they need help.

Beevers said that he recently spoke to a large financial institution that runs NetBox in its production backbone network, connecting over 20,000 branches. That organization told him they love open source, it's powerful, but if anything went wrong operationally with NetBox, they were on their own. It's a situation that NetBox Enterprise will now solve.

The future of network automation with AI

Looking ahead, NetBox Labs is actively exploring the potential of integrating artificial intelligence (AI) to further advance the state of network automation.

Some form of AI assistant is among the options that the company is currently considering. Beevers hinted at the company's plans to leverage the vast network data corpus collected from thousands of enterprises to develop AI-powered capabilities.

“NetBox Labs is a company that is building this gigantic install base that affords us visibility into many network data models,” he said. “If you think about that corpus, it really helps us to feed the machine with an understanding of how networks are built and operated, how they're automated, and what the best practices are around that.”