Sohonet, one of the most respected private networks serving the global media community has selected Opengear's SmartOOB™ platform to provide remote console connectivity across its international network.
Since its foundation in 1995, Sohonet has grown from serving the UK media industry based around London to offering network operations internationally and is renowned for creating the world’s largest independent media network. With additional offices in Los Angeles and Sydney, today Sohonet serves over 400 media and entertainment companies including BBC Worldwide, Abbey Road Studios, HBO and NBC Universal amongst a growing list.
As a deeply technical company, Sohonet builds many of the bespoke management tools it needs to ensure that its network is ultra-reliable and performant to meet the needs of its exacting global client base. As Ben Roeder, CTO at Sohonet explains, “When you need to access a network element that has a problem, on the other side of the world, your remote access platform had better work. We had originally used another out-of-band product and we were generally happy with it, but over the years and with acquisitions it has become less open in terms of our ability to integrate with it. After a chance meeting in Sydney with the Opengear team, we tested their products and found it to be a better option.”
With over 60 PoP’s across three continents, the Engineering team at Sohonet uses multiple primary and secondary links to each site to insure reliability. “But hardware will fail eventually and having console access to manage remote configuration changes, power cycles or even for drop shipping new hardware that we can setup over remote consoles is a simple but critical requirement,” says Roeder.
Sohonet has deployed Opengear Management Gateway family devices at all of its sites to provide smart out-of-band access to switches, firewalls and PDU. The Opengear solution has also been integrated into its own in-house created network management system and to date has proven extremely flexible and reliable.
The Opengear ACM5500 Management Gateway enables secure remote monitoring, access and control of distributed networks and remote sites, delivering complete and uninterrupted remote management. The ACM5500 family includes up to 8 serial ports, Integrated console server and FIPS 140-2 validated encryption, SSL and SSH, stateful firewall, OpenVPN & IPsec. “We like an open philosophy for network infrastructure tools and Opengear have been true to their word about keeping the system that way while adding features on a regular basis,” adds Roeder, ”It might not be sexy but it works every time, and for us, that is the most important benefit.”
