April 2021

Advanced Out-of-Band Management for a Major Media Provider

by ZPE Systems | Apr 26, 2021 | Case Studies, Out of Band Management

Out-of-band management brings critical connectivity to your network infrastructure. As a secure way to access your systems, out-of-band (OOB) helps you troubleshoot issues, patch devices, and maintain uptime with more control of your network.

Here’s a 90-second video explaining how OOB helps you prevent data center disruptions.

Out-of-band also delivers crucial capabilities far beyond the data center. When coupled with cellular failover connectivity, you can deploy OOB solutions to take control of your most remote sites. In fact, one major media provider took advantage of OOB & cellular failover by implementing Nodegrid at their rural locations. Continue reading to find out more.

Out-of-Band; Cellular Failover Bring Big Benefits

With a secure OOB path and modern connection speeds, you can establish a reliable and fast access path to your networks. You don’t have to juggle delicate admin protocols or put up with slow modems & phone lines. Instead, you can respond instantly to issues and mitigate downtime.
OOB allows you to cut down on support costs and effort. Without a comprehensive solution, you’re forced to put staff on-site for issues large and small. This means spending time & money collaborating staff schedules, setting up travel arrangements, and coordinating support timelines & resources. But OOB lets you put your best people on the job instantly, even if they are thousands of miles away from the network location. Just imagine turning a three-day hassle into a three-minute job.
Using cellular failover, you can get reliable backup connectivity for your production and management networks. This boosts the resilience of your support efforts, and at the same time helps you maintain steady customer satisfaction levels.

How Does Nodegrid Make Out-of-Band Better?

Nodegrid brings advanced out-of-band capabilities to organizations across the globe. Whereas traditional OOB solutions involve modems, phone lines, and vendor-specific UIs, Nodegrid features OOB that’s simple fast. That’s because ZPE Systems’ innovation-driven engineers focused heavily on the drawbacks of legacy solutions, and created out-of-band that’s easy to deploy & use.

You can roll out Nodegrid on your existing system without any overhaul. Just deploy the standalone ISO image and get a view of your network infrastructure, no matter which vendor solutions you use. To make management simple, Nodegrid Manager comes standard and gives you a clean, unified UI to control all your network devices, both physical and virtual. You can access your OOB network securely from your browser, whether you’re using a desktop, laptop, or mobile device.

Nodegrid’s advanced out-of-band is supported by broadband connection, and is also accessible via cellular. This gives you added peace of mind knowing that if your main connection goes down, you can keep your networks running and maintain management access via cellular failover. For even more redundancy and reliability, Nodegrid devices support up to 4 SIM slots, giving you backups for your backups.

Who Uses Nodegrid’s Advanced Out-of-Band?

A large media company required a strong defense from downtime. A major obstacle, however, was the fact that the enterprise served very rural areas that could be difficult to support.

For each service area, the provider deployed hardware stacks consisting of legacy solutions. When issues presented themselves, the company’s reputation hinged on how quickly they could restore service. Oftentimes this was no small feat, because they required a technician to be dispatched for troubleshooting. After lengthy travel times (upwards of hours, in some cases), the technician would connect their service computer which would allow support staff to remote-in via dial-up connection.

To uphold their reputation and customer satisfaction levels, the media provider needed to slash their response times and support costs with a more efficient out-of-band solution.

The company deployed Nodegrid, which delivered the capabilities they needed along with strong cellular connectivity and backup.

Want to learn more about Nodegrid’s advanced out-of-band? Download the case study now!

Shifting Gears: How Network Automation Drove an Auto Company to the Cloud

by ZPE Systems | Apr 19, 2021 | Case Studies, Pillar 1 - Data Center Infrastructure Management, Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP)

Case Study – Moving Data Center to the Cloud

Download the Case Study

Network automation and zero touch provisioning are more than luxuries. They’re quickly becoming the powertrain of business, helping you meet growth demands and keep up with important opportunities. These technologies also prove invaluable to making sure everyday tasks don’t hold you back, regardless of the environment you’re using.

By adopting automation, you can quickly realize its time- and cost-saving benefits that transform your networking capabilities — whether you’re using a traditional client-server architecture, or a cloud-based configuration.

In this blog entry, you’ll see how Nodegrid accelerated one car company’s drive to the cloud, and how network automation helped them seamlessly shift gears.

But first, here’s a recap of network automation.

Network automation employs software to help eliminate manual management tasks. This can help with routine work, such as device discovery or firmware updates, to more in-depth processes that are part of configuration management jobs. Automation helps with every aspect of networking, including improving the test lab environment, streamlining deployments, and reducing the workload for ongoing support and maintenance.

The beauty of automation is that you can use it at any scale you like. This can mean implementing something as simple as a few workflow commands that assist with device discovery and mapping, or as extensive as automating configuration tasks for a zero touch provisioning approach.

Why are companies racing to adopt network automation?

Network automation improves business in the same way that engines improve transportation. This simple analogy highlights the benefits of automated network tasks and processes, so let’s break it down.

Without modern machines, we rely entirely on manual input to move from point A to point B. Stamina and endurance are crucial, and so is the ability to think critically in the event that unexpected adversity crosses your path (i.e. storms, injuries, bears). Even if you’re in tip-top shape physically and mentally, relatively short ventures can drag on because your input drives the entire trip. Everything seems like a marathon.

And this is how manual networking feels. Discovering devices, installing security patches, monitoring data usage, updating firmware — all these tasks and more rest on your shoulders, and it’s up to you to carry them to completion. There’s little time, if any, to do anything besides focus on your arduous (non)adventure.

When you introduce engine-driven transportation such as a turbocharged sports car or tuned up off-road vehicle, you can easily go anywhere. Your mechanized chariot of horsepower converts your most minor input into forces that lurch you toward your destination. As for your stamina, endurance, and time, you save it all — even as you power through torrential rains or traverse over rocky mountainsides.

Automation transforms networking in the same way. You no longer have to heavily focus on every task and process, and can instead set your gaze on what’s beyond the horizon.

Deployment — Network automation lets you automate configuration tasks and set up zero touch provisioning. This means that you can save a ton of time and money getting new sites configured and online. Instead of having staff perform extensive manual provisioning duties, you can just install your devices and let zero touch provisioning build your network automatically.
Support & OPEX — For ongoing network support, automation continues to deliver time and cost savings. You don’t have to manually address every patch installation, firmware upgrade, or other issue. This means fewer truck rolls and more time for staff to focus on critical business needs.
Maintenance — Nothing helps you maintain uptime like autonomous networking. With automation, you can set up scripts for a self healing network, and create alerts & notifications that let you know when critical issues occur.

How does Nodegrid supercharge network automation?

Network automation brings you major benefits, and Nodegrid delivers even more. That’s because Nodegrid is an open platform that lets you take advantage of automation, regardless of which vendor solutions you’re currently using. This flexible solution helps you:

Customize using third-party automation tools & solutions of your choice, including in-house scripts and software.
Extend automation and zero touch provisioning to end devices, even those that don’t support automation.
Control devices remotely — from anywhere — no matter which vendors or manufacturers you deploy.

Here’s how Nodegrid put an auto company’s migration on cruise control.

For a major automobile manufacturer, a private cloud network model was necessary to help them meet their business needs. The challenge, however, would be in finding a solution that could integrate with their automation-heavy environment. They also required a solution that could provide reliable and comprehensive out-of-band access to their data centers, along with tools that could support collaboration with their heavily involved NetOps & DevOps teams.

With an already fatigued IT staff, the traditional approach was a roadblock nearly impossible to pass. Manually migrating and provisioning would burn too much time and effort, and pull network personnel away from keeping everyday operations in motion.

But when the company discovered Nodegrid, they realized that they could put deployment and management on cruise control.

By deploying the Nodegrid Serial Console S Series, the auto manufacturer had a powerful engine to drive their private cloud adoption.

Download the full case study below to discover all the benefits

Download the Case Study

Improving Network Design for a Major Online Retailer

by ZPE Systems | Apr 13, 2021 | Case Studies, Consolidation, Network Automation

Out-of-band management is a critical component of network design. Instead of using one of your main networks for administrative tasks, out-of-band (OOB) gives you admin access via a completely separate path. In this blog, you’ll learn about how one of the world’s largest online retailers implemented OOB, and how Nodegrid brought a few major surprises to the table.

Why consider out-of-band in network design?

How you approach network design depends on your industry, business goals, customers, and many other factors. However, enterprises across the spectrum implement out-of-band because it’s crucial to keeping networks running.

Out-of-band (OOB) gives you an isolated access path to your network’s assets. When it’s time to make routine updates, implement configuration changes, or address network threats, OOB is your secure line for administration. You don’t have to put your main network at risk or interrupt service. And with modern OOB solutions like Nodegrid, you can give support staff convenient remote access. No more rolling a truck for issues like resetting a password or updating firmware — you can do it all even from half a world away.

Here’s a recap video explaining Out-of-Band Management:

Along with OOB, you should also think about automation and consolidation when considering network design. Together, these three solutions bring you significant benefits like time and cost savings:

Out-of-band gives you remote access to your infrastructure. Think about no longer having to roll a truck every time a device needs to be rebooted, a patch installed, or a configuration rolled back. This can save you tremendously on support costs, boost response times, and help you maintain network & business continuity.
Network automation lets you automate critical tasks. When it comes to deploying new locations, you can take advantage of zero touch provisioning and get a network that builds itself. This helps you allocate resources more efficiently (i.e. let staff provision remotely instead of having to coordinate expensive travel plans & on-site work). You can also automate ongoing tasks and even non-routine work, saving you even more time & money on support.
Consolidation using all-in-one devices helps you save on CAPEX, rack space, and energy. Instead of having to deploy several devices to deliver failover, Wi-FI access, switching, routing, etc., you can use consolidated appliances. This can significantly reduce your stack, deployment costs, and support expenses.

How does Nodegrid improve network design?

ZPE Systems’ Nodegrid is pioneering network design capabilities that weren’t available until just a few years ago. And as you’ll see with this case study, we’re reinventing networking with possibilities that network engineers only dreamed of until recently.

Nodegrid’s advanced out-of-band gives you remote access without slow modems and phone lines. It takes advantage of fast broadband over WAN, and is even supported by cellular failover paths. So even if all your other network connections suffer an outage, Nodegrid’s out-of-band gives you continuous access to your infrastructure.

Nodegrid also supports custom automation via the most popular automation tools. Not only can you use zero touch provisioning and make configuration management a breeze, but you can also deploy your own in-house applications for seamless integration.

On top of all this, Nodegrid features all-in-one devices that let you wield the power of consolidation. In fact, you can replace up to six devices using the Nodegrid Services Router, which is a powerful appliance for converged infrastructure and features capabilities like switching, routing, cellular failover, and more.

But don’t just take our word for it.

Here’s how Nodegrid improved a major retailer’s network design

When a Fortune 500 business needed out-of-band at its distribution centers, they were faced with drawbacks. Traditional thinking meant they would install a network switch and an out-of-band device at each MDF. But Nodegrid came along and completely reimagined their network design.

Instead of wasting rack space, energy, and CAPEX & OPEX by implementing a traditional solution, the Nodegrid Services Router was deployed and helped save across the board. Without expanding their stack, the e-commerce giant got an all-in-one device with serial and networking capabilities that allowed them to gain full control of MDFs and IDF closets.

Out-of-band and consolidation were vital components of the implementation. But a major key would be seamless integration with the company’s automation-heavy environment. Nodegrid’s open, automation-friendly platform fit right into their network, and they deployed their proprietary kick-off application with ease.

Want to get the full story? You’ll get the details about how Nodegrid streamlined network design to deliver savings, convenient management, and customer satisfaction.

Download the case study now!

Your 5-Step Checklist to Network Automation

by ZPE Systems | Apr 8, 2021 | Increase Productivity, Network Automation

How can you overcome the challenges of network automation?

Network automation is key to simplifying administration. As infrastructures become increasingly complex, IT teams everywhere struggle to optimize their enterprise networks and minimize downtime. This brings challenges like:

Huge deployments with aggressive roll-out deadlines
Growing lists of manual tasks just to maintain normal operations
Failing to make infrastructure and services more predictable and reliable

All of these call for quick changes and rapid response times that only network automation can deliver. But the truth is, automation is difficult to implement. With so many vendors and technologies integrated into your infrastructure, how do you even begin to implement automation? It’s certainly not a “one size fits all” solution, and is instead as unique as each organization.

Follow this 5-step checklist to network automation

The good news is, we’ve put together this checklist to make implementation less daunting for you.

Here are five best practices for adopting network automation.

1. Discover and identify

You first want to find out what you can and can’t automate. Focus on things that improve business value and the end-user experience. A key value proposition of network automation is how quickly it scales, so identify your most important capabilities and services that need rapid scaling.

- Bring in cross-team collaboration. Discuss and align all input and output dependencies, along with interoperability requirements for each of the building block components.
- For manual processes, optimize them before you automate them. This ensures you’re as efficient as possible, and provides a strong foundation for implementing the automation process (what must be automated vs what shouldn’t be automated).
- Take inventory of the state of your network by identifying components and configurations in your data centers.
- Identify and list manual tasks and workloads, their dependencies, and time-consuming, error-prone activities. Example: If you spend tons of time on requests for routine changes, find the requests that bog you down most.
- Identify the scripting requirements for successful automation. Which language(s) do you need? Do you need more training, or a bigger headcount?

Tip: Automate everything you can, even niche and non-recurring things like:

- Scheduling tasks
- Insights into servers and nodes, and their configurations
- Patching, updating, and monitoring & reporting tasks

2. Segment and analyze

Once you’ve identified the tasks for network automation, it’s time to determine the process, based on the tasks the automation will perform. Build a decision matrix to determine how different network functional blocks interact with one another. Based on various network services, you can segment the infrastructure into different blocks and then analyze how they interact.

Automation solutions can be as varied as the systems and software found in the data center. As application environments get created, a number of manual tasks and vendors could introduce numerous opportunities for error.

On infrastructure and network services, automation must be segmented in small blocks so you can understand how each component of the infrastructure architecture interacts. This is where cross-team collaboration comes into play to help you identify the various dependencies.

3. Simplify and standardize

In this step, your goal is to simplify and standardize work processes and requirements (inputs/outputs). This marks the start of your full-fledged automation solution. When you simplify the deployment process, you reduce the time-to-market for both new and existing workloads.

To simplify existing processes, you need to define standard network service configurations to respond to repetitive tasks and requests. By doing so, you can address more than half of the change requests and significantly reduce implementation time. For new requests, you can either work them atop the existing configuration, or the existing configuration to satisfy the new requests.

Insight: By defining the automation process early on, you define how to implement it at scale.

4. Design and test

After identifying, simplifying, and standardizing the automation tasks, you can work on the smaller items from the list you created in Step 1. Start with simple tasks and then move on to more complex workflows.

Here are some tips:

1. 1. Start small. Use trial and error to automate the easiest tasks, and work your way to automating more complex tasks. This approach helps you achieve successful implementation at every level, while allowing you to roll back small changes and quickly fix issues that may occur.
  2. Define a testing strategy. With this in place, you can take advantage of maintenance windows by testing automated tasks to make sure they’re working as best as possible.
  3. Aim for a self-healing system capable of detecting events and applying necessary changes automatically.
  4. Design the automation and workflow of each network component to deploy self-servicing capabilities. Also, be sure to associate incremental tasks so they align to create business services and activities.

5. Implement and manage

With all the testing and planning taken care of, it’s time to implement and manage your newly automated systems. It’s important to remain vigilant while continuing to learn and grow, so that you can implement automation quickly, safely, and efficiently. Fine tune your process, and focus on more than improving uptime — strive for continuous improvement of how your network can respond to issues and changes.

Part of managing your automated systems is to not just fix issues as they occur, but to constantly monitor and re-test tasks. Even seemingly non-impactful changes can break automated tasks, which can leave you with network disruptions and outages. To address and prevent this, test your automated tasks regularly to ensure that they continue to perform as needed.

Tip: Make sure your network documentation is centralized, accessible, and editable. When you make changes, always update and re-verify your documentation. This ensures accurate information is available for those who need it most.

Need more help with network automation?

For specialized help with your unique network automation challenges, contact ZPE Systems.

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