Network Computing Awards honours innovative Smart-OOB solution deployed within progressive private cloud hosting provider
Slough, UK – April 18 2017 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, has won “The Network Project of the Year” at the 2017 Network Computing Awards for an implementation that helped Secura Hosting reduce its data center technician visits by 30% leading to a return on investment in just 7 months through smart out-of-band access.
Celebrating its 10th year, The Network Computing Awards are the UK’s longest running and most prestigious awards programme focused specifically on networking products and service vendors along with successful end user projects. The judging panel selected an Opengear installation that is helping Secura Hosting, a virtual private cloud hosting provider, to deliver mission critical services to enterprises from multiple UK data centers.
“One of the areas for improvement that we identified was around infrastructure management and maintenance across our data center locations,” said Dan Nichols, Secura’s Chief Technical Officer. “As highly secure environments, gaining rapid access to a site during off-hours is not easy. The amount of travel time and the inconvenience of having to visit sites to carry out tasks like firmware updates, patches, and other configuration changes requiring console access were really inefficient.”
Recognising that the process of deploying engineers to its remote data center locations was not a viable long-term solution, following an extensive evaluation, Secura selected the Opengear CM7100 console server with intelligent out-of-band technology to provide monitoring, automated fault response and remote management capability. Secura estimates that it achieved a full return on its investment with the CM7100 console server solution within a mere seven months. In large part due to the remote access to critical equipment, Secura has been able to reduce technician visits to its data center locations by 30%.
“Opengear provide us with the ability to remotely access management functions of our network and storage elements at each site, and to carry out key tasks that cannot be done over the normal management platforms,” said Nichols. “By using Opengear, we effectively save a couple of days each quarter in management time and in the event of any unexpected issues, we have an effective out-of-band method of quickly troubleshooting any physical device at any data center location.”
Automated intelligence capable of overseeing system health and environmental conditions in the data center has helped Secura derive significant value through proactive remediation of issues. Automated responses to faults are guided by customized rules and policies, enabling the CM7100’s technology to immediately begin performing complex actions before a human technician has even had time to respond to alerts. Built-in environmental sensors supervise temperature, humidity, and risk of water at the data center, as well as motion and door access to ensure security against human tampering. The ability of these systems to quickly and intelligently power down equipment or reroute connectivity when necessary – thus avoiding downtime and keeping services operational – has helped Secura win more business.
Derek Watkins, Vice President of Sales EMEA & India at Opengear said, “We would like to thank Secura for helping us with the award submission and the judges at Network Computing for recognising the benefits that smart out-of-band technologies are delivering in the real world.”
