Opengear (www.opengear.com), a leading provider of critical infrastructure management solutions through advanced console servers, remote management, monitoring, and cellular out-of-band products, today announced that the engineering design firm has successfully deployed Opengear technology at all of its remote sites throughout the USA and international offices. The provider of energy consulting services and engineering services in the energy, food and beverage, facilities, communications, environmental, and federal markets chose Opengear to increase operational efficiency and lower overhead costs.
POWER Engineers’ selection of the Opengear ACM5504-2-P console servers has enabled remote, out-of-band access across those dispersed sites while adjusting to the variety of connection types needed at each location. Opengear’s ACM5504 product family supports multiple avenues for connectivity, including Ethernet links (such as DSL, WAN connections, & fiber transceivers), 3G/4G LTE links, and analog modem connections. That flexibility enabled POWER Engineers to deploy a single solution that fit all of its needs.
« POWER Engineers wanted a way to consolidate and centralize its out-of-band management tools and access, » said Todd Rychecky, VP Sales Americas. « They also needed a solution that allowed multiple, individually authenticated simultaneous sessions for training, and one that would be able to adapt to the variety of their existing remote site setups. The ACM5504-2-P’s versatility allows it to use whichever connectivity means best suits each particular site without compromising on other vital features like security. By doing so, it can also reduce the number of individual pieces and tools required to manage each site. »
Additionally, using Opengear technology has allowed POWER Engineers to ship units directly to new sites and lets the ACM5504 « check in » with the Operations Group, the division of POWER Engineers responsible for the installation of these worldwide sites. The centralized access has reduced new install overhead tasks and saved the time that would otherwise have been spent shipping each unit to corporate headquarters to be preconfigured before deployment and reshipment to final deployment sites. The ACM5504 also improves efficiency by reducing mean time to repair, because the Operations Group can respond faster with easy-to-access console logs that can be used to determine root causes and the best course of action before traveling to each site. Even more, troubleshooting can be accomplished remotely, so physical interaction — and therefore travel to the physical location of the remote site(s) in question — may not be necessary, saving even more time and resources.
“Opengear’s ACM5504 allowed us to provide a secure and consistent access point experience for all sites and consolidate multiple tools from five of the leading Network Infrastructure vendors into a single solution from a single technology provider, » said William Audette, Senior Network Engineer, POWER Engineers. « It’s been instrumental in speeding up deployments and reducing the number of tools we have to use in support of our infrastructure environment. »
The ACM5504-2-P Remote Management Gateway features:
- Deployment in wiring closets, branch offices, communications cabinets and harsh remote sites
- Military-spec security, FIPS 140-2 SSL and SSH, stateful firewall, OpenVPN & IPsec
- Environmental and physical sensor alarm notification via SMS, SNMP or Nagios
- Automatically detect and recover from network outages and repair equipment faults
- Power-over-Ethernet
- Built-in TFTP server & 4GB flash storage for remote configuration
- Flexible in-band and out-of-band management access as needed
- Broad support of typical authentication methods and mechanisms such as local policies and group permissions, or common enterprise protocols such as TACACS, RADIUS, LDAP, and Kerberos V, assignable to each accessible interface.
