I met with Opengear on the sixth floor sixth floor of Casino M8trix in San Jose, CA on Wednesday afternoon October 10, 2012 for Networking Field Day 4. The Networking Field Day 4 delegates and myself specifically met with Jared Mallet and Toby Smith of Opengear.
I have no personal experience with Opengear although I’ve used competing products to provide out-of-band serial/console access in my data centers and large computer rooms. I can’t remember who but someone referred to these devices as the “save my bacon” device and I would definitely agree. I can’t begin to state the value of having an out-of-band network available once you start having problems or even when performing upgrades or scheduled maintenance. They have literally helped me resolve problems in minutes as opposed to hours. Anyone that’s serious about their network should have every serial/console port wired to a console/terminal server for out-of-band access via dial-up or as you’ll hear in the Tech Field Day videos cellular 3G access.
I’m going to outline the different presentations that we heard and perhaps make a few points here and there if I have anything useful to say. I’ll include a short blurb from OpenGear in italics to help define/describe each product or discussion point. Thankfully since the sessions were recorded you can watch for yourself and make your own informed opinion.
Here’s my disclaimer; I’m not endorsing any of the solutions presented below. I’m merely passing on the information along with a few comments of my own. If you have any personal opinions about the solutions below why not share them with us in the comments?
OpenGear Products
Tech Field Day Video
by Jared Mallett and Toby Smith
Opengear is a leading provider of enterprise grade console servers, cellular routers and remote management solutions that enable our customers to easily tame IT complexity. Our commitment to simplify remote management enables our products to deliver what IT professionals really need and want with unquestionable security and value.
Opengear’s extensive support for out-of-band management ensures our customers have access and control even when their network is down. The result is a drastic reduction in the need for expensive on-site technical staff, on-site visits and rapid problem resolution.
- DCIM (Data Center Infrastructure Management)
- RIM (Remote Infrastructure Manager)
The rack mount appliances include the following models; CM4000, IM4200, IM4216-34 – combines both IP and serial access saving rack space.
My Thoughts?
This device is the swiss army knife of the data center engineer. It truly is the life line to your data center allowing you to access the serial/console port of your switch, router or appliance in the critical minutes during an unscheduled outage allowing you to quickly and remotely troubleshoot and resolve the problem or issue. The appliances run a variant of uClinux and support remote access via PPP (modem), PPtP, OpenVPN, and IPSec. OpenGear provides free software downloads for the life of the product, no maintenance contract required.
I was provided an 4 port console server model ACM50004-G by Opengear which I’ll be drafting a review of in a future post.
VCMS – OpenGear version of Nagios
Tech Field Day Video
by Jared Mallett and Toby Smith
Opengear VCMS is a powerful system that centrally monitors and manages distributed Opengear products and their managed devices from a single console. VCMS delivers flexible target device management control for large data centers with a hundred rows of racks, or in power utility networks with thousands of smart appliances. Designed to reduce downtime and establish a single point of access, the VCMS aggregates “call home” sessions from isolated devices initiated remotely both in-band and out-of-band. The VCMS allows for unified visibility of all managed devices across large enterprise networks seamlessly from a common cloud hosted appliance with intuitive browser interface.
PDU/RPC Power Managment – PowerMan
My Thoughts?
If you happen to have a few dozen console servers hanging around your environment you can leverage VCMS to help manage them. If you are already running Nagios, OpenGear supports running NRPE and the NSCA Nagios client checks locally on the actual ACM, CM, IM console servers since they are running uClinux. I’m excited to see OpenGear leveraging other open source projects such as Nagios to help their customers manage their appliances.
Cellular Out-of-band Management
Tech Field Day Video
by Jared Mallett and Toby Smith
Managing distributed IT infrastructure is hard enough. Why make it more complex and expensive by having to buy, deploy and manage multi-vendor proprietary management tools? An integrated out-of-band management solution should be a flexible solution that deploys quickly, begins working immediately, is simple to use and manage, and integrates seamlessly with existing IT management systems.
The Opengear ACM5000 and IM4200-X2 families support internal and external cellular modems. These modems will need to be provisioned by the cellular carrier for a data plan. Once provisioned, the Opengear devices can than be configured to operate in variety of modes for cellular connectivity.
My Thoughts?
Now you can access your console server via a cellular 3G network as opposed to a out-of-band network or dial-up modem. The Opengear appliances support DyDNS for dyanmic IP address assignment and even support call home functionality over IPSec or OpenVPN to a centralized management solution such as VCMS. Static IP address assignment is also available if you can get the carrier to provide one. The console server also support SMS text messaging as a means of waking it up, so your not using up your mobile minutes or bandwidth allocation until you actually need the device.
Demo – Advanced Console Management via Web Dashboard (Tech Field Day Video)
Closing
I’d like to thank Opengear along with Jared and Toby, we had a great discussion around a very important piece of data center equipment. If you are relying on your data center providers “Smart Hands” I’ll warn you now, the cost of these devices will easily pale in comparison to the costs you’ll incur when you can’t get access to troubleshoot an outage. I’ll be personally evaluating Opengear against my incumbent vendor.
Cheers!