Opengear lights the way

Opengear, provider of critical infrastructure management solutions through advanced console servers, remote management, monitoring, and cellular out-of-band products, brings customers advantageous new features at no additional cost with today’s announcement of IM and ACM management appliance firmware 3.11 and Lighthouse centralized management 4.5, now available for download. Continuing to innovate not only with new hardware products but also with software advances, Opengear listens to customers to understand their workflows and ensures their products evolve accordingly. Following an established roadmap continuing the goals of always improving user experience, best practice security and scalability, Opengear consistently provides valuable new features to its extensive product range.

Highlights of these dual product upgrades include:

Enhanced SNMP status monitoring and alerting, with updated MIBs and SolarWinds integration

Vendor-neutral power management updates to manage even more PDU models including the latest from APC, Raritan, Tripp Lite, and WTI.

Lighthouse node-command CLI for mass configuration modification, user management and firmware upgrades across many or all managed console servers

Disconnect console sessions via browser UI and new pmusers CLI

Support for OpenLDAP AAA including simple configuration of LDAP over SSL

“Speaking to partners and customers, it’s clear that the IT infrastructure layer is still a healthy mix of rival vendors,” said Robert Waldie, VP Business Development, Opengear. “Even an organization that proudly claims to be a ‘Cisco shop’ still has loads of competing vendors spanning critical parts of their data center and branch sites. Across UPSes, PDUs, telephony, firewalls and other network equipment, the diversity of vendors and generations of products on even a mid-sized network is daunting. These new releases strengthen our ability to manage more devices, in line with our open, vendor-neutral philosophy. The goal is to help IT managers finally retire a few of the old and mostly unused management screens that hang around to support a few esoteric bits of kit across the infrastructure.”

The major upgrade to SNMP capabilities allows for gathering and reporting more information from a wider range of serial, USB and IP-managed IT, network and power devices. Each Opengear IM or ACM appliance provides a single point of secure, highly available monitoring for an entire rack, row or remote cabinet install, negating the need for half a dozen different software apps to know that everything is working as planned. Monitoring also extends to the environment, with optional sensors including humidity, door open and water leak, to detect and alarm on physical events before they escalate into catastrophic failure.

This vendor-neutral mentality is part of Opengear’s long-standing ‘open’ ethos. Choosing to champion compatibility and ease of use for the customer – and understanding that stressed IT and network managers want everything visible and auditable in as few systems as possible – Opengear sits outside the partisan policies where certain vendors choose not to support rival products within their management tools in the hope of fostering customer lock-in.

The philosophy extends both to downstream-managed devices and upstream management software, with Opengear also announcing updated integration into SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor. Stating that this is certainly not the finish line, Opengear development teams are continuing to add support for new managed devices in both new launch and established products.