Opengear Expands Remote Site Gateway Capabilities

IT infrastructure management vendor Opengear has announced new Remote Site Gateway models, adding advanced capabilities and better performance.

“The new Remote Site Gateways replace the older generation of Opengear’s Remote Site products, the now EOLed ACM5000 and ACM5500 series,” Opengear CTO Marcio Saito told ServerWatch. “The new Remote Site Gateway has a faster processor, more memory, is available with integrated Ethernet switch, and has enhanced connectivity with built-in PSTN modem and SFP/Fiber connectivity.”

The new Remote Site Gateways include the ACM7004-5 (4 x GbE RJ45 LAN Switch and 1 x SFP/GbE WAN Port), ACM7004-2/ACM7004-M (2 x GbE WAN Port) and the CM7008-2-M (2 x SFP/GbE WAN Port). The Remote Site Gateway devices are intended to help enable organizations to more easily, remotely manage servers and IT infrastructure.

The new gateways include Opengear’s SmartOOB (Out-of-Band) management that help to notify administrators of potential downtime issues. According to Opengear, SmartOOB maintains complete control during infrastructure failures and network outages with integrated serial, Ethernet and USB console access to all server, networking, and power infrastructure at remote sites.

Automating Remote Provisioning and IT Infrastructure Operations

Remotely managing servers is something that many administrators can and will commonly do with basic tools like SSH. Saito commented that in the next few years Opengear expects to see an increasing focus on the automation of remote provisioning and operation of the IT infrastructure, both for remote office/branch offices and data centers.

“Opengear is working to make that vision possible and investing in functionality that enables remote operation that is secure and truly zero touch,” Saito said.

He added that Opengear has its own Zero-Touch Provisioning (ZTP) feature, which enables the provisioning of Remote Site Gateways to be completely automated. Going a step further, the Remote Site Gateways can then be deployed to automatically handle the setup of other infrastructure at a given location.

“Once provisioned, the Remote Site Gateway becomes a tool to automate the provisioning of the rest of the infrastructure by detecting other devices, via features like Link Level Discovery Protocol (LLDP) and by serving firmware images and configuration files to other networking equipment,” Saito explained.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at ServerWatch and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.