Introducing Lighthouse 5 Centralized Management for Out-of-Band

If you’ve ever wished your out-of-band management network would take care of itself, you need to check out Lighthouse 5. If you’re already running Lighthouse 4, you can deploy Lighthouse 5 fully in parallel. You can run them both side by side and you can even use Lighthouse 4 node orchestration to automate the enrollment process into Lighthouse 5. When you’re ready to cut over, you can make that transition at your own convenience.

Lighthouse 5 is a fantastic new product offering that we’ve put together. It allows things to be done in a different way. One of the things that we’ve tried to embed is a solution that will not only look at managing the Opengear product, but also some of the other providers as well, which, whether it be an Avocent or a Cisco, the out-of-band management solution is a combined offering.

Lighthouse has been re-architected form the ground up and really purpose built to provide centralized resilient out-of-band management for all your network. Data center – scale up in the data center and scale out to your remote sites.

So what makes Lighthouse different from maybe a traditional central management software, is that it’s actually a hybrid solution that utilizes Opengear appliances distributed around your network, and it enrolls them as Lighthouse management nodes.

Having worked with remote management devices for a long time, I was really happy to see a lot of the features that go in there. Whether it’s device management, inventory management, being able to track what’s under support, what’s under warranty, what’s connected and what’s not connected, and being able to search and group devices dynamically.

We’ve integrated a RESTful API, so what this means is our users can leverage the Lighthouse management system’s unparalleled connectivity and resilience to integrate out-of-band management into their other systems.

The RESTful API allows for two way communication to third party software. Whether it be downstream, such as a ticketing system, or upstream, such as a reporting system, it allows me to quickly access my data through integration with a chatbot where I can actually come in and approve a node or I can send a message to one of my fellow team members if there’s an alert going on in the data center.

So what Lighthouse does, is it leverages the resilience that’s inherent in the Opengear system and the Opengear solution, and centralizes that, and provides the maximum value in that there is a cost of deploying resilience on your network. It means you’ve got other IP endpoints to manage. You’ve got effectively a second network to manage, an out-of-band network. What Lighthouse does is it reduces and nearly eliminates the cost of managing that network by taking care of all that detail by proving the central access portal, the central fabric to access your management network so you can get access to all of your consoles, to all your remote infrastructure, to all your remote sites, without having to worry about the underlying detail of how it’s all connected together.