At Tech Field Day Cisco Live, delegates saw a demo of Lighthouse 5, showing off the capabilities of Opengear’s brand new Centralized Management software. Each of the delegates is an enthusiastic participant in the wider tech community, and several of them live-tweeted throughout the session, giving an instant view of their reactions.

Marcio Saito, CTO of Opengear, set the stage with an overview of out-of-band management, and the evolution of console servers.

The needs of network engineers have changed as IT infrastructure moves toward hyperscale deployments. With a more cross-disciplinary NetDevOps role, along with a looser coupling of the hardware and software components, companies are looking for less complex design, with low touch and less vendor-specific technology.

Rob Waldie, a Distinguished Engineer at Opengear, then described how the new Lighthouse 5 platform will help users not only with ongoing network resiliency, but also in simplifying the automation and provisioning of their IT infrastructure. With the Lighthouse VPN, Zero touch enrollment, and support for third-party console servers, the capabilities of out-of-band now go beyond monitoring and remediation. Smart Groups and Tagging mean that one instance can now be used to manage thousands of nodes, in hundreds of locations.

But delegates really got excited when he revealed  the RESTful API that comes along with Lighthouse 5.

To show the flexibility that this brings to console management, Rob demonstrated a zero touch enrollment of a virtual data center using Slack. With the help of a Lighthouse chatbot, he walked through the provisioning, configuration, discovery and enrollment of a number of virtual devices, all within the Slack channel.

The demo highlighted that Lighthouse 5 is a Centralized Management platform that’s been designed and built specifically for NetOps. The RESTful API lets advanced users tap in to any existing application in their current workflow, and manage their infrastructure within the toolset they are familiar with.

We’ll leave the last word to the delegates:

For more details on Lighthouse 5 Centralized Management, and the full video of the TFD demo, click here

Thanks to the team at Gestalt Media for setting up Tech Field Day – Tom Hollingsworth @networkingnerd and Stephen Foskett @SFoskett.

And to the delegates: Ryan Adzima @radzima; Amy Arnold @AmyEngineer ; Teren Bryson @SomeClown; Jeff Fry @fryguy_pa ; Jordan Martin @bcjordo; Scott McDermott @scottm32768; Richard McIntosh @802Tophat; Eric Stover @Eric_Stover