Network Operations Center
Just as system administrators need to maintain the highest availability of applications and data in the data centre, so network managers must maintain network infrastructure uptime in the network operations center (NOC). Today's dynamic environment sees the myriad of VLAN switches, routers, firewalls, intrusion systems, VPNs and other devices in the NOC all being reconfigured on a regular basis to meet the daily business needs of internal users and external clients.

This dynamic impacts availability as well as performance, as a simple configuration error in VLAN tables, routing tables or firewall rules can make hundreds of servers and devices unreachable. Generally network devices can be easily configured in-band on the main network or over a dedicated management network via a browser. However, once they have become unreachable due to some firmware instability or internal configuration conflicts, they can often only be managed out-of-band via their serial text console.

Opengear's infrastructure management solutions provide in-band and out-of-band methods to monitor and configure remote NOC devices over secure serial console or network console connections.



For high-end networking, telecom and storage gear a plain-old serial port is still the most common interface for communicating with the embedded management interface. And the CM4000 console manager is particularly suited to sites that manage network infrastructure primarily using in-band and out-of-band serial console access. It also monitors and logs console messages alerting network administrators of impeding issues before disaster strikes. If high availability in the serial console server solution is required, then the IM4200 is the answer.

The IMG/IM4xxx gateways are also suited for those NOCs that wish to securely use their main LAN, or the management LAN for communicating with the embedded management interfaces (using HTTPS, SOL, IPMI etc). The local USB flash storage in these gateways can also aid in recovering configurations and firmware images on switches and routers. Keeping copies of these images locally enables them to be downloaded into the network appliances in a variety of ways as part of a failover or disaster recovery plan, even when parts of the network are still unreachable.

For example a network manager might want to locally back up a router's current configuration file to the IMG/IM4xxx gateway before changing its contents (thereby allowing him/her to later restore the original configuration file from the server). They could simply copy Cicso configuration files from a router to a file server using TFTP and store the configuration information on the IMG/IM4xxx tftp server. For more info refer faq 281