Retail Conglomerate Uses Out-of-band Management Solution to Centrally Manage Data Centers Globally 

Highlights

• With more than 50 businesses, 75 prestigious brands, and 5500 stores to support, this multinational market leader relies on 10+ data centers across continents processing millions of records daily.
• The central IT team evaluated multiple solutions while seeking an out-of-band solution to enable remote access to their data centers.
• They ultimately chose Opengear ACM7000 resilience gateway and Lighthouse Management Software because it offered a secure and simple way to access their data centers remotely.

Overview

Hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide expect nothing but excellence from this luxury goods conglomerate. To continue delivering exceptional experiences to its customers, this Fortune 500 Company needs to manage strategic business priorities like artificial intelligence, sustainable development, and digital transformation with a robust network.

This multinational market leader relies on 10+ data centers across continents to support its customers, employees, and shareholders. Therefore, the central IT team needs to have always-on access to these data centers. They need to manage, troubleshoot, and remediate any issues regardless of the network and inband connectivity status.

Challenge

With a large, distributed network and data centers thousands of miles from the company’s headquarters and the central IT network services team, it was challenging to manage specialized devices such as switches or firewalls. When a disruption occurred in a data center, the team had to send a local qualified technician to diagnose and remediate the problem. This process took longer than they liked and carried significant operational costs (e.g., IT staff and traveling).

Things became even more complicated when a qualified local technician was not readily available leaving the central IT team waiting 4-5 hours. This delayed time to resolution even more.

At other times, the central IT team just needed to run tests to evaluate the health of a data center device. Without remote access to that device, this was not possible.

“At times, the central IT team just needed to run tests to evaluate the health of a critical device in one of our data centers. Without remote access, this was not possible.”

Solution Architect, Central IT Team

Solution

The central IT team evaluated four different solutions while seeking an out-of-band solution to enable remote access to their data centers. The support they received from the local Opengear team and the platform’s robustness helped them decide. They ultimately chose to deploy Opengear’s ACM7000 Resilience Gateway and Lighthouse Management Software because it offered a secure, simple way to access and proactively manage their data centers remotely. 

Now, with ACM7000 console managers deployed, the team can connect to the remote console ports of the switches, firewalls, and other sensitive devices in their data centers without third-party help. Additionally, they can test and manage their devices from anywhere to ensure availability and performance.

Moreover, the central IT team deployed Opengear Lighthouse Management Software in the public cloud and secured it with a firewall. This enables them to securely access Lighthouse over the public internet during an outage. Additionally, where an internet connection is not dependable, the team uses a dedicated IPsec tunnel to connect to their ACM7000 console manager. This brings an extra layer of security and capability to resolve any connectivity issues that may arise.

The Results

The Central IT team can now access and manage their data centers remotely in more than 10 locations from their headquarters through Lighthouse and ACM7000 console managers.

With simple and reliable technology, they streamlined the deployment of pre-configured console managers, making remote configuration and deployment easy. The team is satisfied both with the greater access to their data centers as well as the resulting cost savings. Managing data centers in-house, remotely, through central management software allows on-demand response to issues and control over troubleshooting and management, as well as peace of mind for the whole Central IT team.