Opengear, a leading provider of solutions that deliver secure, resilient network access and automation to critical IT infrastructure, has announced its integrated NetOps Automation platform that will offer enterprises a full-featured network automation solution to significantly streamline network and infrastructure operations.
The announcement of the beta availability of the solution was made at Cisco Live, Cisco’s annual IT and communications conference, held between June 10 and 14 in Orlando, Florida.
As the popularity and adoption of NetOps evolves, its inherent network virtualisation carries increased risk to data centre infrastructure and heightens the need to correctly provision, configure, remediate and automate distributed networks.
With the NetOps Automation platform, Opengear builds on its industry leadership pioneering cellular-enabled out-of-band access, monitoring and remediation to now provide secure, automated and vendor-neutral network provisioning, remote configuration and orchestration purpose-built for NetOps use cases.
The NetOps Automation platform leverages expanded capabilities within Opengear’s award-winning Lighthouse 5 centralised management system and a growing array of NetOps module applications.
It also introduces the new OM2000 Operations Manager, in combination with Opengear’s existing solutions for network resilience.
Opengear’s Lighthouse 5 centralised management software aggregates an organisation’s entire out-of-band infrastructure, enabling local or remote users to quickly and securely access any connected console via an HTTPS web interface or SSH connection.
Opengear’s remote management solutions provide Lighthouse 5 with this access, utilising embedded cellular connectivity within Opengear’s Smart OOB and failover to cellular technologies to reach devices even when the main network connection is down.
The first of Opengear’s task-specific NetOps modules – the secure provisioning module that allows enterprises to provision infrastructure at remote sites through an automated process and without any need for on-site technicians – is now available in beta and is targeted for general release in September 2018. Other modules will follow.
The NetOps Automation platform utilises a fully open architecture, including a Git-based file repository within Lighthouse 5, Ansible integration to provide orchestration and enable automated IT workflows, a RESTful API, Docker integration and a Linux software base.
With the OM2000 Operations Manager, Opengear is introducing the first appliance specifically designed to address the unique challenges created by the evolution of NetOps practices.
The central feature of the OM2000 is a cryptographic TPM chip that ensures security by detecting and preventing tampering with the hardware, firmware, software, configurations or VPN keys.
The OM2000 also allows teams to run applications on the appliance or on Lighthouse 5 using Docker containers, which make it easy to deploy and run applications at the network edge.
“The NetOps Automation platform is designed to give enterprises with large networks a clear, reliable and secure way to achieve full network automation every single time and avoid the need for experienced network staff at every location,” said Marcio Saito, CTO, Opengear.
“By combining Lighthouse 5, the OM2000 Operations Manager and our Secure Provisioning NetOps module, along with standard Opengear appliances, businesses can now ship critical hardware to locations with no IT staff or network connectivity.
“They can then connect to it via the embedded cellular connection and manage automated provisioning that gets that site up and running with no further intervention required. We believe this will give many more organisations what they need to vastly simplify their network and infrastructure operations.”
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