Out of Band Management or OOBM is a valuable tool for enterprises with many locations to manage remotely. It addresses building a highly resilient network infrastructure with proactively avoiding network disruptions.
When time is money, a wireless fail-over solution will provide secure, remote console Out-of-Band Management.
Out-of-Band Management to the console port of the primary router is a value-added layer to any distributed enterprise. A secondary secure path to the devices at remote locations
when the primary network goes down means minimized disruption and downtime, ensuring business continuity and happy staff at remote locations.
Hardware provides a secondary WAN connection over LTE or Metro WiFi, as well as a secure remote method to access your primary branch router’s serial console port for configuration, troubleshooting, and management over 4G/LTE. This also can provide a dependable backup WAN connection without the need to install expensive wire-line circuits. Such a secondary WAN connection can also provide router redundancy for the LAN via VRRP while ensuring high branch LAN availability with router redundancy and ease-of-use.
Common Network Challenges
With many distributed enterprises moving mission-critical applications to the cloud, there is an incredible importance on the branch LAN and WAN to be up and running 24/7. Not only is this
important for the retail industry for Point-of-Sale systems, but also for the branch and mobile office as well.
If a piece of equipment or the network does go down, the IT staff has to deal with not only the responsibility of lost revenue and productivity, but also repairing the issue. HQ must bring the circuit back up when down, but more often than not they don’t have the ability to see what the issue with the remote router actually is. They put in a trouble ticket to the carrier, but if the problem is the router, it can take hours to figure that out.
Why Use Out of Band Management
When out-of-band access is available, you are assured access to your network even when your primary WAN fails. This means that you can be looking at your routers in just ten or fifteen minutes, from anywhere in the world. Have you ever had a network failure and spent six or eight hours waiting for a truck roll to make a repair, only to discover that you have a hardware problem?
What speeds are available with LTE?
LTE is a rapidly growing technology, with bandwidth speeds that are rising every year. Your results will depend on signal strength, but LTE routers are designed with POE to allow you to locate them wherever you need to, to obtain the best signal strength. External antennas are also easily installed in locations that require them. Assuming good signal strength, maximum download speeds are:
- LTE Cat 3: 100-Mbps
- LTE Cat 4: 150-Mbps
- LTE Cat 5: 300-Mbps (scheduled for 2016)
- LTE Cat 6: 450-Mbps (scheduled for 2017)
What does LTE cost?
The average LTE cost is approximately $10/GB. With less than 5GB usage, plan on $60/month, but you can obtain smaller plans for $25/month and simply pay for usage when you need it.
How will I manages these LTE routers?
It’s simple, using a single web interface that can manage all your LTE routers worldwide. If any one of them loses connectivity, you will know it.
Would you like to learn more about LTE for out-of-band management? Contact us now.
