Opengear adds failover-to-cellular feature

Opengear has announced the addition of a Failover-To-Cellular (F2C) feature on its popular lines of ACM remote site management and IM infrastructure management devices. F2C combined with its Smart OOB™ portfolio delivers unparalleled availability and connectivity. The launch comes as Opengear sponsors the inaugural Fog Computing Conference, beginning today in San Jose, California.

With exponential growth of M2M and the Internet of Things driving the need for smarter real-time decision-making, deeper data analysis, and more robust data storage at the network edge, the demand for always-on connectivity and resilience in the face of network failure events also continues to rise. Thus, quick identification and remediation of connectivity issues between dispersed Internet-connected devices and remote infrastructure is critical.

“With a projected 26 billion Internet of Things endpoints forecast to exist by the end of this decade, maintaining constant connectivity is a huge challenge for businesses that derive critical value from IoT device data,” said Rick Stevenson, CEO, Opengear. “Now is the time to ensure that distributed networks are resilient and that remote sites are accessible even when a primary connection goes down. Ensuring rapid recovery from network and other IT failures and having a solution that scales are critical. With our new Failover-To-Cellular feature added to Opengear’s extensive Smart OOB product line, we are giving network administrators a smarter, faster and more secure connection to critical networks and devices. We are giving them the ability to reliably access, monitor, alert, manage, and control their infrastructure.”

The Failover-To-Cellular capabilities will be available in December 2014 in Opengear’s cellular-enabled ACM remote site management and IM infrastructure management devices and will include the following features:
§ Transparent failover to 4G/3G cellular networks using simple and reliable IP Passthrough technology that allows business operations to continue while IT staff resolve connectivity issues with the primary Internet connection
§ Serial connectivity to routers, switches, firewalls, and PDU consoles to troubleshoot problems
§ Transparent “fail-back” when the primary connection is restored
§ An easy drop-in solution which works with most existing routers that have dual WAN support

Opengear’s launch of Failover-To-Cellular comes on the heels of its recent Smart OOB™ software upgrade, which offers a unique combination of out-of-band access and monitoring capabilities with auto-response and remediation for a wide range of IT infrastructure devices. Adding Failover-To-Cellular to Smart OOB serves to improve availability, uptime, and efficiency of networks in data centers, as well as at distributed and remote sites. As the effective cost of IT and network failures continues to grow exponentially, Opengear continues its commitment to protect customers from experiencing costly outages by ensuring connectivity regardless or primary connection status.

“We’re excited to be announcing our new capabilities at the first-ever Fog Computing Conference,” said Gary Marks, President, Opengear. “Smart OOB for remote site management when combined with our new F2C feature plays a critical role in the emergence of Fog Computing and its reliance on the network edge to do more. It’s a transformative time for the industry, and we think we’re already ahead of the game with what we can offer.”