Opengear (http://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 DigitalOcean, a cloud infrastructure provider and the second largest hosting company in the world, has used Opengear’s console server and infrastructure manager solutions to affordably maintain resilient connectivity across its unmanned data center sites in remote locations around the world. The successful implementation includes dependable cellular-based backup connections that feature Smart OOB™ and Failover-to-Cellular™ capabilities. With Opengear equipment operating in every rack of DigitalOcean data centers, Opengear’s solutions have been used to provide reliable server management and out-of-band connectivity, ensuring that every server can be accessed, even during network outages.
DigitalOcean uses Opengear 48-port console servers in its data centers, where the console server on each rack manages the approximately 40 servers located there. DigitalOcean has continued to deploy Opengear solutions as its needs evolve and grow, demonstrated by the recently developed upgrade to its data center design that makes use of new Opengear platforms. These include the CM7148 console manager and the IM7248 infrastructure manager, which features LTE connectivity. In addition to the capability of providing out-of-band management via a redundant cellular connection, Opengear solutions feature network UPS and environmental monitoring, and the ability to perform diagnostics and maintenance functions quickly and remotely.
DigitalOcean also finds Opengear’s solutions to be powerful and cost-effective in their ability to remotely bootstrap an entire data center. In practice, an out-of-band server tasked with providing remote access will be hooked up to a firewall and spider out to all data center devices needed to bootstrap a site.
“We rely upon Opengear heavily for the initial site bootstrapping, and to handle any problems that arise where the server is completely offline and otherwise inaccessible,” said Jeremy Stretch, Network Engineer, DigitalOcean. “With sites around the world, we don’t have people at every data center all the time, so it’s crucial for us to be able to get to any of our globally distributed devices at any time.”
“Always-on resiliency and uptime are the essence of the cloud infrastructure and hosting business,” said Todd Rychecky, VP of Sales Americas, Opengear. “We’re glad to see DigitalOcean thrive on the basis of their vision and reliability, and proud to provide the solutions that safeguard their resilience in the data center.”
In DigitalOcean’s experience, Opengear’s solutions have proven to be more flexible, more affordable, and more reliable than competing solutions. DigitalOcean plans to continue to utilize Opengear in its data center plans into the future.
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