HEAnet: providing network uptime for education

by Jordan Baker | Nov 15, 2021 | Case Studies, Failover Connectivity, Increase Productivity, Out of Band Management, Pillar 2 - Critical Remote, Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP)

If there’s one sector that relies on network uptime more than ever before, it’s the education sector. For both in-person and virtual learning, students and staff connect to crucial resources around the world to share information. The infrastructure that enables this connectivity is critical, and in the country of Ireland, this infrastructure is deployed and maintained by HEAnet.

As the national education and research network, HEAnet is a provider who must adhere to stringent service levels in order to keep entire education communities online. But they recently faced a few major challenges as their out-of-band (OOB) management solution neared its end-of-life (EOL) date. This system was crucial to maintaining network uptime, as it gave engineers remote access to their 50+ nationwide locations. They needed to quickly roll out a new solution, but they were faced with a second challenge — limited staff.

It seemed HEAnet was stuck between a rock and a hard place. They would surely need to outsource the job, and that’s when they turned to Rahi, the world-renowned MSP who introduced them to ZPE Systems’ Nodegrid.

The rest is history, and for a deep dive into that lesson, download the full HEAnet case study below.

But before you do, here’s a quick refresher on critical infrastructure and why network uptime can be difficult to maintain.

Critical infrastructure and network uptime

Critical infrastructure is made up of the systems that connect sites to each other and to the rest of the world. The data center is an obvious example of where critical infrastructure is deployed. Points-of-presence (POPs) and colocations are other somewhat obvious examples. All of these house components, such as servers, switches, and routers, which are essential to handling data and traffic that organizations rely on.

Here are more examples of where critical infrastructure is commonly found:

Warehouses: servers, routers, and Wi-Fi access points help humans and their automated counterparts track inventories, fulfill orders, and communicate with vendors.
Manufacturing plants: operationalized technology like sensors and IoT devices collect data from gauges, robots, and machining equipment to ensure accurate measurements, maintain quality control, and streamline fabrication processes.
Cellular base stations: compute, storage, and failover devices process signals, store data, and provide backup connectivity for critical cell site components.

Organizations must maintain high levels of network uptime for their critical infrastructure, since it supports the lifeblood of everything they do. But this can be a challenge because these components are not always located within convenient reach of skilled engineers.

Why can network uptime be so challenging to maintain?

Maintaining network uptime can be challenging even for fully-staffed locations. This difficulty is amplified — quite dramatically — when organizations have to recover and maintain sites that are located far off the beaten path.

Imagine this: you’re responsible for monitoring and troubleshooting critical infrastructure for a network of college campuses in your region. One of your most remote sites, which serves more than one thousand students and faculty on any given day, experiences sudden disruptions and eventually goes offline. It’ll take close to four hours for you to put skilled staff on site to recover the network, which puts you at risk of breaching your SLA. You and your team are stressed out and scrambling, while students and teachers have no option but to cancel some or all of their activities.

Now imagine that you have a tool that allows you to respond instantly and restore the network before anyone even notices. That’s the kind of power you can achieve with a deep, robust out-of-band management solution, which is one of the tools HEAnet deployed to keep disruptions from reaching users.

There’s more that can go wrong, however. Your sites could suffer an ISP outage, leaving locations in the dark if they don’t employ any wireless backup connections. Or if your customer has a multi-vendor MSP solution that you’re part of, the other vendor’s components may be to blame, and you need a tool that can help you quickly diagnose the root cause.

Download the HEAnet case study

To see more challenges you might face when maintaining network uptime, download the HEAnet case study. You’ll also discover how Nodegrid gave them seamless backup connectivity and allowed a single Rahi engineer to deploy two sites in a single day. Get the case study now.

NetDevOps Transformation Process & Critical Steps for Network Professionals

by Jordan Baker | Nov 3, 2021 | Increase Productivity, NetDevOps Transformation

It,Engineers,And,Technician,Discussing,Technical,Problem,In,Server,Room

The NetDevOps methodology helps organizations streamline their network, development, and IT operations through automation and cross-team collaboration. This blog will explain the NetDevOps transformation process and the critical steps you need to take to implement NetDevOps in your organization. First, let’s define NetDevOps.

What Is NetDevOps?

NetDevOps is the practice of applying DevOps principles to the network team. DevOps focuses on reducing the barriers between development and IT operations teams by encouraging greater collaboration and automation. It does this using various tools and methodologies, but of particular relevance are Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD).

On the operations side, IaC automates the provisioning, configuration, and management of your data center infrastructure. This improves the speed at which systems can be added and updated, and reduces the amount of human error involved in system configuration. With IaC, you write infrastructure configurations as machine-readable code or definition files that describe the desired state of the machine. The code is managed like any other software development project, in a central repository with versioning control, and can be tested, deployed, and integrated automatically.
On the development side, continuous integration (CI) allows developers to frequently merge revisions and updates to code in the codebase or central repository. Automated tests run every time new code is checked in to ensure no bugs or security vulnerabilities are integrated into your build. This allows development and QA teams to find and fix problems early in the software development lifecycle (SDLC).
Continuous delivery (CD) automatically deploys the new code into a test environment for further functional and non-functional testing, including load and integration testing. The code is then prepared for production.
Continuous deployment is essentially the same as continuous delivery, and some people use the two terms interchangeably. However, continuous deployment refers to the automated deployment to the production environment.

When we apply these principles to the network operations side of an IT environment, combined with a culture shift that emphasizes cross-team collaboration, we get the NetDevOps methodology.

NetDevOps transformation process and critical steps for network professionals

To achieve NetDevOps transformation in the enterprise, you’ll need to implement software-defined networking, which will allow you to apply CI/CD processes and streamline deployments. You will also need to shift the culture in your organization to prioritize eliminating the barriers between your cross-functional IT teams.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) for NetDevOps

Software-defined networking (SDN) is essentially just IaC for networking devices like routers, switches, and firewalls. With SDN, you can write machine-readable definition files to define the desired state of your device. The device will then install, update, or roll back its configuration based on the information in that definition file.

For example, imagine you have ten remote branch offices, each of them with two wireless access points (WAPs) that are the same make and model. Using SDN, you can easily deploy a third WAP to each location and automatically deploy a definition file that applies the current configuration, OS update version, and firmware version to those new devices at the click of a button. This saves your network engineers from having to spend their valuable time staging devices or traveling to deploy them in person. In addition, manually configuring devices and running CLI commands increases the risk of human error, so SDN can save you from costly mistakes by automating your network configurations.

Since the IT operations and networking teams have a lot of overlap in terms of knowledge and tools, it’s easy to see how IaC can apply to NetDevOps. But how does the software development methodology of CI/CD apply to networking?

Implementing CI/CD processes for NetDevOps configurations

SDN works by treating network device configurations as software code, allowing you to implement CI/CD processes for network configurations. To help you understand how that works, let’s examine the CI/CD pipeline from a network management perspective.

CI involves continuously integrating new code into the existing software repository by automatically merging changes and running tests. For NetDevOps transformation, SDN code is checked into a central repository. CI automatically applies version control and change management to ensure nobody accidentally breaks or writes over someone else’s code. In addition, automated unit tests run on the code to check for bugs.
Next, the CD will deliver the new SDN configuration to a testing environment, typically with virtualized devices on a private network. In this environment, you can perform automated testing. For example, load testing will check for performance issues, and security testing will ensure the definition file won’t introduce any vulnerabilities to your production network.
Finally, continuous deployment will automatically deploy your configured device to the production network. Since the SDN definition file was thoroughly tested in both the CI and CD stages, the device can go live on your network with minimal impact on end-users and business operations.

Now you understand the technological processes and tools that enable NetDevOps transformation. However, one of the most challenging aspects of any major organizational shift is getting all your people on board with the changes.

Encouraging an organizational shift towards NetDevOps culture

What do we mean when we say NetDevOps culture? The foundational principle of NetDevOps (and any other DevOps derivative) is breaking down barriers and informational silos between teams and encouraging collaboration and integration. This is done partially with software tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams that enable cross-team communication and collaboration—but it’s mostly a mindset.

People are resistant to change, mainly when it affects their work. Before your enterprise can fully adopt NetDevOps, you need a plan for communicating functional changes to your people and training them on how to adapt their workflows. For example, network engineers aren’t always comfortable writing code, so they may need some time to learn SDN and practice their new skills before you rush ahead with implementation. Your engineers will also need to learn how to use your specific SDN and network automation tools.

In addition, you need to foster a culture of open communication, especially involving mistakes. As everyone learns new systems and processes, someone will inevitably make mistakes or forget a new workflow. This can be incredibly stressful when your people are also dealing with a new organizational model in which the lines between departments are blurred, and there may be multiple managers involved in any task. That’s why it’s critical to develop a business culture that doesn’t punish mistakes or questions and instead encourages everyone to work together to solve problems. This culture shift will enable a smoother NetDevOps transformation for your enterprise.

Empower your NetDevOps transformation with Nodegrid

NetDevOps transformation requires fostering a culture of open collaboration and communication within your IT teams, which helps you automate your network device configurations using SDN and CI/CD for faster and more accurate deployments. Automation shouldn’t stop there, though—you should employ network automation for as many management tasks as possible to further streamline your operations.

For instance, you could use the Nodegrid network management solution to consolidate your data center infrastructure management behind one pane of glass. The Nodegrid family of hardware and software features zero-touch provisioning, which automatically discovers and adds new devices to your NetDevOps environment. Plus, Nodegrid is completely vendor-neutral, so you can easily integrate it with your SDN and CI/CD tools.

Want more information about how Nodegrid can empower your NetDevOps transformation?

Contact ZPE Systems online or call 1-844-4ZPE-SYS.

How Automated Network Management Helps in the Remediation of Human Error

by Jordan Baker | Oct 15, 2021 | Increase Productivity, Network Automation

Large enterprises rely on the management and administration of their networks to continue their daily operations. In recent years, networking trends have pointed towards using automated processes to regulate and administer enterprise networks. Automated networks free up administrators to tackle more complex and specialized problems requiring the human touch. In addition, the automation process offers the advantage of eliminating the possibility of common mistakes caused by user miscalculations.

Network automation isn’t just growing in terms of ability; it’s also becoming much more popular. GM Insights illustrates how the network automation market is expected to grow by 26% CAGR between 2020 and 2026. This trend continues the general move towards automation in previous decades, where its use as a replacement for human involvement has become mainstream. This dramatic rise in usage will likely set the standard for network management in the years to come, making it more important for administrators to wrap their heads around it.

This article discusses network automation and illustrates use cases, the challenges, and solutions of automated network management.

What is network automation?

Simply put, network automation is the use of software to automatically perform tasks and protocols formerly performed manually by network engineers. This means the granular work of configuring and reconfiguring switches and routers is done automatically through preset automated scripting initially set up by the administrator. This shifts the network administrator’s role to focus on creating these processes and adjusting them, when necessary.

The applications for these processes change by industry. For example, a network administrator working in healthcare typically needs to monitor, adjust, and repair broken systems on their own to ensure that the network is running smoothly. In particular, they need this network to be exceptionally secure—if it is not, the medical information on the network could potentially be at risk. Similarly, they have to ensure that their network is updated to comply with HIPAA privacy laws. This process can be incredibly time-consuming, taking up time better spent on different specialized tasks.

Automated network management applications

Although the push to automate networks is far more popular today than five or 10 years ago, some are still waiting for more information before committing to the switch. Network automation offers several advantages over manual network operation, including:

Easier management
Faster workflow
Frees administrator time

The effects of networks not being appropriately managed are too significant to ignore. When a network is left unattended or not managed enough, it experiences difficulties with everything from application performance and lag to (at maximum) major security breaches. The dangers of network failure are even more prominent for businesses, resulting in potential data leaks and cyberattacks. Damages to the business’s reputation are also crucial factors to consider, which creates PR nightmares and financial losses that may take years to recover from.

While automation benefits apply across the board, there are also specific use cases where network automation offers unique advantages. Below we discuss automated networks and how they benefit configuration management, changes, and compliance.

Automating configurations

Network configuration refers to how the network is set up and organized. It contains information on all hardware devices attached to the network and controls all processes involved with repair and maintenance. In this sense, a network’s configuration management database may be one of the essential elements to automate.

The benefits of an automated configuration management network include:

Replacing network functions in the event of a failure
Saving configurations in different formats
Controlling and monitoring network repairs
Overseeing network upgrades
Storing information on default network systems

Automated networks perform these actions automatically (or automatically notify the administrator, if preferred), taking the labor demand out of them. It similarly offers network engineers the option of saving different configuration options for when they might want to enable them.

Automating changes

It’s important to remember that the systems we use to regulate our networks today are not necessarily the same systems we will use in the future. As the tools and programs used to regulate a network evolve and grow over time, network administrators also benefit from a system that automatically updates and adapts to them. Automated updates benefit every industry from tech to automotive, as businesses are generally more successful when they can quickly adapt and integrate new technologies as they become available.

Automating compliance

Although the internet used to be the wild west in terms of legislative regulations, legal restrictions quickly catch up with technology. The last two decades have seen major legislation regulating user privacy (HIPAA) record-keeping (Sarbanes-Oxley Act) and transparency (Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act), but industry projections expect new laws to be enacted, which networks will have to reflect.

Manual networks pose a much more significant challenge to administrators trying to compensate for these regulations. By switching to an automated system, administrators can ensure that their network meets the criteria as defined by the law and focus their energy on more advanced issues.

The challenges and solutions of network automation

Despite everything that automated networks provide for administrators and users alike, many are hesitant to embrace them, citing a variety of potential problems with their use. A few major concerns include:

Perceived loss of security
Complex tools which require management themselves
Need for customization
Legacy systems & devices

Some of these issues are more about the perception of automated networks rather than the networks themselves. However, others represent real concerns. A banking company, for example, may have excessive security needs to protect customer funds. The consideration of legacy systems—outdated non-integrative software still in use—affects all industries.

These concerns are understandable, but often don’t reflect reality. The complex tools involved in an automated network, no matter how difficult, do not hold a candle to the energy required to manage a manual network. Nearly all automated networks offer the customization options sought by significant industries, and legacy devices are, in reality, not quite as unreachable as most of us think. More information on the steps to network automation will illuminate how automation can adapt to practically any setting.

Network Automation; the next steps

The trend of automation is becoming more critical to understand than ever. As network management trends move further away from traditional human-centered models, the hardware used to manage them will quickly become outdated. It will become vital for competitive enterprises to automate their networks to stay relevant with that in mind.

Moving forward, automated network management is much easier with the help of an experienced partner.

ZPE Systems offers excellent options to bring your network management to the next level. Feel free to contact us for more information.

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.

7 Reasons Why We Put Intel CPUs in the Nodegrid Serial Console

by ZPE Systems | Dec 16, 2020 | DevOps, Improve Network Security, Vendor Neutral Platform, Virtualization, Zero Trust Security

Intel® CPUs power many of the computers we use today. These include everything from personal desktops and laptops, to high performance computing clusters that aggregate power to solve major global issues. So when choosing a suitable processor to build into our Nodegrid Serial Console, Intel was the obvious choice. In this post, we’ll go over 7 reasons why we put Intel CPUs in the NSC.

But before we get into the details, let’s review some basics.

Besides Intel CPUs, What Else is Available?

There are mainly two types of CPUs, or processors, available today: x86 (such as Intel’s offerings) and ARM. Though they serve a variety of purposes and can have some overlapping applications, x86 processors are typically deployed when speed & power are main concerns. Meanwhile, ARM processors are used in implementations geared toward minimizing power consumption and maximizing battery life.

The way these types of processors work is based on their underlying instruction set. x86 CPUs take advantage of the Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC), which is able to process complex instructions that are crammed into a single line. ARM-based CPUs, on the other hand, use the Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC), which processes simple instructions over a span of multiple lines.

As for the advantages, x86 processors are able to perform more tasks rapidly, while ARM processors are able to consume less power and maximize energy efficiency. The main drawbacks include more power consumption for the x86 CPU, and slower speeds for the ARM CPU.

This is why purpose-built appliances, such as modems & routers, typically employ an ARM-based processor, while highly demanding devices such as desktops & servers use an x86 CPU.

In a nutshell, this is why we chose the multi-core Intel CPU for the Nodegrid Serial Console. But here’s a more detailed breakdown of the reasons for our choice.

Performance is Key

The Nodegrid Serial Console is designed to maximize speed and capabilities. Using x86 Intel CPUs, we created the world’s fastest 1U serial console that doesn’t compromise on performance. This processor allows for more simultaneous operations, more users, and more input/output than ARM-based CPUs. In terms of real-world benefits, this blazing fast processor means quicker CPU cycles that help customers complete more tasks, reduce MTTR, and increase their ROI.

Commonality Helps Users and Developers

Many existing servers use x86-based CPUs. Naturally, we wanted Nodegrid to integrate seamlessly for both users and developers. The Intel-based processor promises a common platform that these users are already accustomed to. They don’t have to worry about application incompatibilities or slowdowns, nor do they have to spend time learning new systems. The x86 CPU provides a management and maintenance experience that users are familiar with, so they can maintain OS & application availability.

Customization Through a Common Dev Environment

Our Intel-based devices are a perfect platform to deploy custom solutions. The x86 CPU allows developers to benefit from a variety of readily-downloadable SDKs and environments. The Nodegrid Serial Console’s SDK comes with Yocto, which means customers always have the latest updates, packages, and DIY customization capabilities. No more waiting for third-party fixes or workarounds, because customers can create solutions that meet their unique requirements.

Docker

Because the x86 platform is capable of robust performance, Nodegrid allows users to leverage Docker containers and deploy virtualized solutions. With regards to Docker, the Nodegrid Serial Console is optimizable right out of the box so customers can get the most functionality out of a single device.

Availability of Security

When it comes to open networking, the Intel CPU is the industry standard, which means customers get security patches as soon as they’re available. They don’t have to be left vulnerable waiting for third-party kernel patches from other chip makers. With an x86-based device, customers remain safe with up-to-date security, and in some cases can even apply patches before official updates are available.

Peripheral Support Via Multiple Interfaces

Part of designing a more powerful serial console was having the ability to support a variety of peripherals. The Nodegrid Serial Console features USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports, allowing customers to connect an array of add-on devices. They’re no longer limited by a single-purpose appliance that comes with minimal additional ports. With the NSC, customers can extend the box’s functionality by adding cellular, Wi-Fi, storage, and other peripherals.

Greater Storage

With power and speed at the core of the Nodegrid Serial Console, we needed to incorporate enough drive space. We built the NSC with 32GB of storage, along with 4GB of RAM. Not only can it store plenty of data, but it also has a healthy amount of memory to accommodate running more apps and functions. And if 32GB isn’t enough, customers can connect external drives via USB for even more local storage capacity.

This list is made up of 7 compelling reasons why we chose x86 Intel CPUs for our devices. However, there’s an 8th reason that we love to share…

Cost Savings That We Pass to Customers

By choosing the readily-available x86 CPU, we pass powerful processing along with cost savings to customers every day. Because we think having the world’s best serial console shouldn’t be prohibitively expensive.

ZPE Systems is an Intel Network Builders Winners’ Circle Partner

Driving digital innovations and network transformation are visions we closely share with Intel. That’s why ZPE Systems has been recognized as a Winners’ Circle Member and Solution Plus Partner. Together, we offer go-to-market solutions that cultivate customer success and enrich our partner ecosystem with innovative networking technologies.

We partner with Intel to transform networking. See how we do the same with our other partners by visiting our Strategic Alliances page.

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