Opengear (News - Alert), a provider of critical infrastructure management solutions, has announced that its newly unveiled Smart Connection Manager can be used to streamline and improve remote networks’ central management.
“Out-of-band management has traditionally followed the break-fix model,” said Robert Waldie, vice president of business development at Opengear EMEA. “First an outage is reported by a remote user or central monitoring system, then network support staff react to connect to the site out-of-band, finally allowing primary connectivity to be restored. Opengear has built a smarter solution in line with the service continuity requirements of a modern managed network.”
Companies typically keep cellular networks as an alternative for remote infrastructure management and their trust is accentuated by those networks’ pervasiveness, performance and low cost. But during primary outages it is not easy to maintain access over a disparate network connection due to issues like network addressing, routing and security.
In order to minimize costs, enterprises do not implement full network redundancy for high availability in their remote offices. But with the newly released Opengear Smart Connection Manager, they now have the change to enable their central operations staff at those remote sites to enjoy the same degree of remote management resilience normally reserved for those working at data centers or headquarters.
Smart Connection Manager is built in to the Opengear appliance deployed at each remote site, and features network heartbeat testing. It is equipped with the capability to failover between primary wired and integrated cellular wireless connections.
By combining the capabilities of integrated cellular and auto-response automation, Opengear says it has developed a smarter solution that can cater to the service continuity requirements of a modern managed network.
“We are seeing huge uptake in out-of-band management over 3G and 4G LTE (News - Alert), with major network vendors now beginning to follow our lead,” Waldie added. “However, naively attaching a cellular modem to a site’s primary router just replicates the break-fix model of yesteryear and frankly, as an overarching solution, translates to a poor ROI. This major upgrade is completely free to all of our customers irrespective of whether they have a support contract.”
Edited by Rory J. Thompson