Cutting Troubleshooting Time by Days with Opengear

Highlights

• The IT solutions group needed a reliable means to troubleshoot network equipment in the event of in-band issues and set up new sites remotely.
• The team first implemented Opengear appliances five years ago. As the company scaled, the IT solutions team had to support an increasing number of employees and customers, pushing them to upgrade and standardize their out-of-band solution.
• Today, they have a reliable OOB solution that meets their needs.

Customer Story

The company’s unified security and observability platform provides customers with expansive data access, powerful analytics, and automation capabilities.

SecOps, ITOps, and DevOps teams use the APM and observability tool to visualize data and dependencies across the entire technology stack. This shared visibility makes it easy to collaborate and ensures digital systems are secure and reliable.

The company has been growing since its start in 2003 by delivering constant value. Headquartered in the US, the company has 7,000+ employees and holds 1,100 patents. Today, it has customers across 130+ countries, including 95 Fortune 100 companies. All trust the company to gain visibility into their technology infrastructure and keep their systems secure.

Challenge

The IT Solutions (ITS) group oversees IT infrastructure, systems, and security operations. With the company’s growth came new responsibilities for the ITS organization.

The group comprises five teams: network, campus, data center, network security, and platform. As they have been responsible for major projects, such as a campus refresh or a data center uplift & modernization, the ITS group grew and needed more resources. It went up from 14 to 25 engineers. Today, they support 14 locations, including data centers, and an increasing number of employees and customers.

As one of five teams in the ITS organization, the network team, specifically, has expanded. Initially, the group of engineers based in the US covered 14 sites globally. The geographic distance and time-zone differences created operational challenges. The team had to rely on local smart hands or fly an engineer out of the US to another location to access network equipment. In other words, they lacked a reliable way to set up new sites remotely or troubleshoot network equipment if the in-band network had issues.

“The results are crystal clear with Opengear; firmware updates are centrally deployed, and now updating all of my Opengear nodes takes 20 minutes vs. 2-3 hours.”
~ Lead Network Engineer

Solution

First, the team implemented ACM7000 Resilience Gateways. The resilience gateway provides secure remote access to small IT deployments and edge locations. With an embedded, global 4G-LTE cellular modem, ACM7000 delivers an alternate path even when the primary link is unavailable.

The ITS network team deployed 20+ small form-factor ACM7000s. The ACM7000 resilience gateways come in eight serial, four USB ports, and 4GB internal memory. However, as the company flourished, serving more customers and supporting more employees, their out of band needs also evolved. The ITS network team first added IM7248 Infrastructure Managers to their out-of-band solution. Built for data centers and large IT environments, IM7248 comes with 48 serial ports, dual GbE with built-in Fiber SFP, and 16GB internal storage. The infrastructure managers are highly available with the 4G-LTE cellular embedded module.

The lead engineer wanted to streamline the platform when he took over the OOB network service. Following launching the upgrade-and-standardization project, he worked with the Opengear team to replace small form-factor devices. Their goal was to streamline the OOB network with appliances suited for dense IT environments. The team worked with Opengear to get regional-specific console servers. Regional equipment was essential for some APAC regions, such as Singapore. The team recently added OM2248 to their OOB network. Operations Manager 2200 provides more automation capabilities and includes an optional global LTE-A Pro cellular module bringing always-on connectivity.

Results

After going through the upgrade and standardization of their OOB platform, the team achieved the operational efficiency they had sought. The previous OOB solution design meant many small-scale appliances and inefficiencies. As the number of devices in their IT environment went up, they increasingly required appliances built for large data centers and dense IT environments, such as OM2200 from Opengear.

“The results are crystal clear,” the lead network engineer says. They can simply push one config to multiple devices and save 20 minutes per action. This saved time is significant when dealing with dense IT environments with hundreds of devices. When it comes to troubleshooting, the team can save days. Instead of sending smart hands to a site, the network team can “console in” to the faulty device, saving $400-$700 per trip. According to the lead engineer, the mean time to respond (MTTR) is minutes instead of hours. Also, firmware updates are centrally deployed and take 20 minutes vs. 2-3 hours.

Finally, the team pointed out that using Opengear appliances is straightforward as they’re Linux-based. “While the products are easy to use,” the lead engineer says, he has reached out to support, and “the support team has been extremely helpful as he continues to grow and learn.”