opengear
SECURE REMOTE ACCESS OF YOUR CRITICAL NETWORK RESOURCES
SANDY, UT, February 11, 2024 – Opengear, a Digi International company (NASDAQ, DGII, www.digi.com) and provider of secure and Smart Out of Band™ management solutions, is pleased to announce the expansion of its CM8100-10G Console Manager series with the introduction of integrated 5G cellular technology. This release delivers the trusted connectivity, security, and operational efficiency support that customers rely on Opengear for while providing a leading-edge solution for their networks.
AI, IoT, and cloud computing are transforming how businesses operate. These technologies require low latency, high bandwidth, and always-on connectivity, pushing IT organizations to rethink how they deploy, manage, and secure critical infrastructure. When used with Opengear’s Lighthouse® software solution, Smart Management Fabric, and zero touch provisioning, the CM8100-10G-5G addresses these challenges by delivering a 5G-powered Smart Out of Band solution for fast, secure, and resilient remote network management.
The expanded solution includes several standout enhancements:
</ul class=”bwlistdisc”>
Patrick Quirk, president of Opengear, stated, “Business continuity can make or break a business. Including 5G technology in our CM8100-10G series represents a significant step in our promise to provide a network management solution that eliminates disruptions while enabling automatic failover to cellular for seamless access. As demand for networks grows in complexity and the volume of data increases, the need for a fast, reliable, and efficient remote management solution becomes critical. Our latest console manager, the CM8100-10G-5G, is designed to empower our customers to meet these challenges head-on.”
This announcement follows Opengear’s longstanding tradition of enhancing product capabilities in line with technological advancements and customer feedback, ensuring that each solution meets or exceeds industry standards and customer expectations. As the seamless successor to Opengear’s legacy IM7200 product, the CM8100-10G-5G combines 5G technology with network management capabilities.
Discover how Opengear’s 5G-integrated Smart Out of Band solution can strengthen your network resilience. Explore the CM8100-10G-5G at www.opengear.com.
About Opengear
Opengear, a Digi International company, delivers secure, resilient access and automation to support critical IT infrastructure on the First Day, Worst Day, and Every Day. Through presence and proximity, Opengear solutions enable provisioning, orchestration, and remote management of network devices through innovative Lighthouse central management software and a wide range of appliances. Opengear solutions are trusted by global organizations across financial, digital communications, retail, and manufacturing sectors. The company is headquartered in Utah, with an R&D center in Brisbane, Australia. For more information, visit www.opengear.com.
About Digi International
Digi International (NASDAQ: DGII) is a leading global provider of business and mission-critical Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity products and solutions. We help our customers create next-generation connected products and solutions to deploy, monitor, and manage critical communications infrastructures and compliance standards in demanding environments with high levels of security, relentless reliability, and bulletproof performance. Founded in 1985, the company has helped customers connect more than 100 million things — and counting. For more information, visit www.digi.com, or call 877-912-3444 (U.S.) or 952-912-3444 (International).
Learn how one of the top performing banks in the United States utilized Opengear smart solutions to decrease their downtime, reduce the need for site visits, and ensure compliance requirements are met.
To learn more about network resilience solutions for your organization schedule a demo today!
The choice of a distributed architecture for an organization is usually determined by the business requirement to support its remote office base at the same level as its main office. Branch offices broaden the reach of the business and are usually a sign of successful business growth. However once the decision to expand with branch offices has been taken, these offices instantly increase the responsibility of the IT/Network Manager who has to ensure (more…)
Enterprises rely on Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to provide constant uptime. To meet the growing needs of customers, MSPs require advanced tools that can monitor devices remotely, from a wide range of vendors. Not being able to provide the proper management, monitoring, and reporting expected by customers can lead to lost revenue as well as decreased customer retention.
This white paper will explore the challenges of MSPs and provide solutions on how to ensure network resilience with an independent management plane.
Download our whitepaper to:
Throughout the world, everyone’s working lives have suddenly become remote and because of this, visibility has become increasingly important. Social distancing and remote working have now become the norm, and tasks that are critical to business continuity, like going on-site to remediate issues during a disruption or set up a new network, are no longer an option. Lighthouse Enterprise is here to alleviate those issues.
Lighthouse Enterprise already provides network engineers the ability to view and manage their entire network. Now our users are able to take advantage of our new Secure Provisioning Module. Enabling teams to automate the setup of entire remote networks, even when there’s no LAN or WAN in place, the module is a central point that enables the remediation of faults without making a trip out to a site.
Secure Provisioning extends these core capabilities of Smart Out-of-Band, beyond the maintenance and repair of existing networks, to the initial provision of new network routers, switches, firewalls and more. Remote and resilient, it takes the risk out of invasive WAN migration projects and forklift upgrades that have historically come at the expense of business continuity. Secure Provisioning enables an agile approach to network infrastructure management, in line with today’s rapidly evolving business requirements. It helps Ops teams move beyond the “fear culture” and embrace change.
Leveraging the remote presence and proximity of Opengear’s IM7200, ACM7000-L or node at the edge with a secure and resilient cellular uplink to Lighthouse at the core, it eliminates the need for network engineers to travel to remote sites, which it has already been connected to during pre-staging. Basic configuration tasks and pre-staging, which is already done remote, can now be all be done remotely.
Lighthouse Enterprise automatically pushes images, configuration, and script files to the device, which in turn provisions other hardware devices at the remote site. This completes the secure, zero-touch provisioning of local network infrastructure from a single appliance – and with no IT intervention required.
Built on best-practice DevOps tools like Git and Ansible, wrapped in an intuitive UI and powerful RESTful API, Secure Provisioning seamlessly integrates into existing operational workflows – no matter where your organization is on its network automation journey. Secure Provisioning extends the reach of Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP), initially developed for rapid deployment in hyperscale data centers, to the very edge of your network. With support for all major network infrastructure vendors including Cisco, Arista, and Juniper, Secure Provisioning is a vendor-neutral solution that simplifies the delivery of initial configuration and software components to automatically bring network infrastructure online or back online.
The Software Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WAN) market is rapidly expanding, becoming the standard in enterprise deployments. According to MarketsandMarkets1, the global SD-WAN market size is expected to grow from $1 billion in 2018 to $ 4 billion by 2023.
In just the past year alone, we’ve seen a considerable trend when it comes to choosing to deploy SD-WAN and for many reasons. Allowing traffic to be routed over the most cost-effective services, such as broadband, an SD-WAN network can manage multiple types of connections including LTE, broadband and multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) links. Services that require high quality, such as video or voice, or high security, with sensitive information, can still be routed over remaining MPLS lines, although many enterprises are freeing themselves of MPLS entirely, allowing them to invest in Smart Out-of-Band with the savings. Because of this flexibility, SD-WANs can dramatically lessen the cost and minimise the complexity of traditional WANs. However, despite it’s gaining popularity, with deployments in data centers and at the edge, it still needs an alternative path of access to the network in the event of an outage.
In traditional branch networking, branch routers can go for years without needing any intervention like configuration changes or firmware updates. But SD-WAN routers are more sophisticated and run a larger software stack. Firmware updates are common which means that there are many more opportunities for things to go wrong. Updates can leave organizations vulnerable to potential downtime; and visibility blind spots can decrease the effectiveness of deployments, creating security challenges.
SD-WAN also needs additional security offerings to protect an enterprise. The primary SD-WAN connection must be secure and must be added to any other security solution being deployed. These devices are usually fully meshed which means that compromising one device can give attackers visibility into the traffic flow from across the enterprise.
Smart out-of-band management by Opengear allows enterprises to bypass these common limitations. Not only does it provide an alternative path to devices located at remote sites when the primary network is down, helping mitigate the risk that SD-WAN can bring, it can also help facilitate access to edge infrastructure to ensure business continuity.
Attaching Opengear to SD-WAN deployments:
Diagnoses the issue: If a disruption occurs and the internet link isn’t connected, outages are detected immediately. Paired with Lighthouse Centralized Management, administrators are able to identify issues and remediate them remotely without having to roll a truck out to a site.
Allows for always-on access: Failover to Cellular paired with Smart Out-of-Band ensures uninterrupted availability for remote networks with 4G LTE. This allows organizations to continue business as usual while the primary internet connection is down.
Decrease costs: A Smart Out-of-Band solution costs less to deploy and operate. A truck roll and a few hours offline can cost an organization thousands of dollars.
Designed to provide the needed resilience at the edge, Smart Out-of-Band by Opengear is scalable, providing the ability to manage infrastructure at distributed sites. Troubleshooting and remediation at the network’s edge enables organizations to detect faults before they become failures which minimizes downtime and operating costs.
Providing organizations with always-on connectivity and increased resilience in the event of an SD-WAN network failure, Smart Out-of-Band is able to ensure that infrastructure is accessible from anywhere during an outage. This resilient backup connectivity allows enterprises to reduce the time-consuming nature of dispatching engineers to data centre sites to make configuration changes and trouble-shoot issues for business continuity. Smart Out-of-Band and Failover to Cellular™ ensures that SD-WAN continues to operate when all other circuits are unavailable, providing the always-on access needed at the edge. So the next time you’re deploying SD-WAN, remember to attach Smart Out-of-Band.
1 https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/software-defined-wan-market-53110642.html
System outages can result from cyberattacks, human error, or any number of environmental conditions. A wide range of network elements can also cause outages. Cable interconnects, power supplies, switches, dense compute chassis, storage arrays, and even air conditioning are potential sources of problems. And network devices are only increasing in complexity, with software stacks that are frequently updated and susceptible to bugs, exploits, and cyberattacks.
If your primary network becomes unavailable, do all parts of your network, from data centers and branches to edge networks and IoT devices, have connection resilience? As your business grows, your network becomes increasingly complex and new deployments or acquisitions may lack the ability to connect seamlessly through the internet.
Reading this white paper you will learn:
Like what you’ve read here? Subscribe below to be notified of any future content released by Opengear.
(You do not need to fill out this form to get the white paper)
See how a global retail company increased network resilience at its stores and point of sale locations with always-on access, thanks to Opengear’s Smart Out-of-band and Lighthouse Centralized Management software.
To learn more, visit https://opengear.com/retail
WAN Edge continues to be a large focus for IT Professionals worldwide. Data is being consumed at an ever-increasing rate with Online Meetings, Video Presentations and SaaS software and services dominating knowledge workers’ days. The high cost of equipment and leased lines are prohibitive to IT budgets. Keeping up with the needs of a branch office in 2019 is difficult, and more importantly expensive, often forcing difficult decisions on everyday needs.
SD-WAN is quickly becoming the standard deployment for organizations worldwide for many reasons. One of its many benefits is that it helps combat inflated budgets and limited functionality in traditional WAN offerings. While these new offerings provide the ability to use commodity connectivity and include additional functionality at the Edge, they fail to deliver on a key feature that is required by IT departments, failsafe access in outage scenarios. Out-of-Band (OOB) options should be included in any branch office and data center build out. This has not been the case with early adoption of SD-WAN, as organizations are often led to believe it’s not necessarily needed.
Most SD-WAN solutions support service orchestration (mainly cloud-based) from the central controller, reducing human intervention so the end user has to do little, to nothing. The devices call home and the bootstrap, configuration and management processes are engaged automatically.
All of this however, relies on the SD-WAN working well. As the SD-WAN starts to waver and begins to fail you cannot always rely on the SD-WAN to fix its own problems. Under those circumstances it will likely lose communications with the central controller and go offline, and someone has to diagnose and/or replace appliances since the umbilical cord is cut.
SD-WAN nodes will occasionally go offline or struggle and there’s no inbuilt magic to stop it. The reasons may vary but an offline SD-WAN node is a big deal and it may happen through –
Often SD-WAN is sold as ultra-reliable because it supports bandwidth aggregation and traffic splitting over multiple disparate links (cable, xDSL, MPLS, fiber…) with flexible use-cases because it employs methods to prioritize traffic according to application latency. However, SD-WAN does introduce new limitations which include reduced access to supported hardware, difficult to configure advanced features, and varied access or no access to remote troubleshooting.
Opengear’s Smart Out-of-Band (Smart OOB™) manages and recovers SD-WAN nodes even when sites have or are beginning to fail. OOB enables remote setup, ongoing maintenance and disaster recovery of mission-critical IT, power and network infrastructure. By moving computation to the data – as opposed to moving data to the computation, businesses get unmatched speed and effectiveness in managing remote devices. You have options for understanding what happened in real time and getting productivity back without the added burden of having to be onsite.
No-one else has a feature-for-feature equivalent to Smart OOB appliances and centralized management through Lighthouse. Opengear offers site fail-over through cellular connected appliances, Remote System Access, Health and Telemetry monitoring, Remote Power Control, Auto-remediation through smart alerts and actions and SD-WAN appliance reconfiguration from local storage.
Opengear delivers improved resiliency for SD-WAN and for the rest of the edge network. We have become the safety blanket around the WAN Edge where virtualized customer premises equipment (vCPE) platforms or software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) software/appliances are set to boom and it’s the same comfort we provide to keeping traditional routers on-line.
