A maker of infrastructure management solutions has announced a new version of its central management appliance.
Opengear Inc. said Monday the new version of its Lighthouse centralized appliance for managing Opengear gateways and data centre managers now has a Console Gateway for more easily finding network devices.
“When there’s a network fault, re-establishing access can mean looking up spreadsheets and network diagrams to see which management ports are connected where — not ideal when the downtime clock is ticking,” Robert Waldie, Opengear’s vice president of business development for Europe said in a statement. “Not only that, logging into a remote site that’s lost connectivity to the enterprise auth servers has historically meant compromising security, for example hardcoding a master password shared by the entire ops team. Lighthouse Console Gateway solves these two common problems.”
With Console Gateway, administrators don’t have to know which rack or which country a device is located in, or whether it’s currently connected via the in-band network or out-of-band cellular link, he said. Instead the can use an SSH interface to specify the name of the device they want to reach and Console Gateway finds it.
“It simplifies remote access to devices in data centres or branches,” says Todd Rychecky, vice-president of sales for the Americas.
Security best practice mandates consistent and auditable user authentication against a AAA service such as TACACS+, RADIUS, Kerberos or Active Directory, says the company. The new Lighthouse Console Gateway feature authenticates on behalf of the remote Opengear management appliance and passes through authorized connections.
Lighthouse manages Opengear’s IM7200 and IM4200 Infrastructure Managers, its CM4100 Console Servers, ACM5500 Management Gateways and Remote Site Managers and SD4000 Device Servers, and through them connected routers and switches
Lighthouse comes in two versions: a 1U unit in a 19-in. Dell server, or a virtutalized software appliance. The server unit itself has two versions: Standard, for up to 100 of its managed appliances, and Enterprise, for up to 5,000 managed appliances. Pricing ranges from US$10,000 to $17,000. The Lighthouse VM is priced based on the number of licences and ranges from US$1,500 for 10 licences to $8,500 for 5,000 licences.
The company says Lighthouse now offers a convenient single point of management access to critical infrastructure scattered across thousands of data centre racks or remote locations, including those behind firewalls. The gateway gives acces to management consoles without the need for in-depth knowledge of network topology or operational state. Any network device is reachable by name and however it’s connected — via the primary management network, or 3G, 4G LTE cellular and dial-up out-of-band.
The pass-through authentication uses central credentials to manage remote consoles. Sensitive management traffic is encrypted with strong cipher HTTPS and SSH and optional VPN. Operators can use their preferred SSH client or Web browser to connect to managed infrastructure, wherever it is and wherever they are — in the NOC or on the road.
Lighthouse can be bought direct online or in Canada through resellers such as Softchoice and Insight.