Eric Stewart: Running Off At The Mouth

Opengear was the one non-Cisco presentation for the Wednesday, June 5th presentation at Tech Field Day extra (#TFDx) of Cisco Live 2024 in Las Vegas this year …

OK at this point, I can’t help but mention it: Opengear is frequently a #TFDx or #NFD (Network Field Day) presenter. While Opengear is no joke, their participation in Field Day events is, well, something that I (even with only one NFD and two TFDx events under my belt) can’t help but joke a little bit about. I daresay they’re probably one of the most frequent presenters, so much so that, should I get the the opportunity to be a delegate again, won’t help but have to joke, “So it’s going to be Opengear, Cisco, and who else?”

The #TFDx events in particular are geared mainly towards the main vendor the #TFDx is part of. So, when it comes to Cisco Live, that means Cisco gives a vast majority of the presentations. At both this event and the one I attended last year, that meant an entire afternoon of presentations from Cisco.

That also means that the non-Cisco presentation stands out a little bit – aided, of course, by my interest in out-of-band access and the eventual hope that I’ll be able to implement a comprehensive solution on my own employer’s network at some point. This is both good and bad: Good in that what you’re presenting stands out a bit more, but bad in that what you’re presenting stands out a little more especially if you don’t have all your ducks in a row. Did Opengear have the latter problem? Well, let’s talk about what Opengear is doing that I find interesting.

The newest portion of Opengear’s presentation this year was a strong example of how they’ve listened to the delegates’ concerns and ideas, and they’ve gone from a “light touch” deployment model to a zero touch deployment. To understand how it works, you have to be aware of two similarly named services/products and keep straight how they differ:

• Lighthouse Service Portal: This is the first thing an Opengear device will attempt to connect to (via even cellular, if the device has that option) to check in. This is a service provided to all Opengear customers that lists their equipment and provides the ability of a customer to specify what instance of Lighthouse to connect to.

• Lighthouse: A given customer’s instance (which can be internally run or in a cloud) of Lighthouse runs the Smart Management Fabric. The SMF is essentially an OSPF network running over a WireGuard VPN protected fabric through Lighthouse, allowing all of the Opengear appliances running through that Lighthouse instance to communicate with each other. It provides multiple methods for a network engineer to seamlessly access equipment connected to both Ethernet and serially connected equipment whether it be through your live in-band network, or, if necessary, through a cellular connection.

The demo run on the table involved a laptop plugging into a cellularly connected Opengear device that was zero touch provisioned (through Lighthouse Service Portal). This device and laptop were in Las Vegas in the hotel room we were using for #TFDx. Also on that same Lighthouse run OSPF network? Another Opengear device and a server with a remote access card connected to an Ethernet port … in Sandy, Utah.

Multiple delegates, near the end of Opengear’s presentation, commented about how surprising it was that something like what Opengear presented should have been available 20 years ago. Did no one think about it? Maybe; perhaps it’s more of something along the lines that no one thought about putting all these pieces together to provide a comprehensive solution that helps a network engineer with not just the worst day scenario, but makes the out-of-band network useful for first day as well as every day scenarios.

Concerns? Well, of course if you’re making connections across the country (or even, say, from south Florida up to Virginia), latency is going to be a thing, and every day usage (assuming your in-band network is still alive and passing traffic) shouldn’t involve traffic having to ping pong or hairpin a long way away. That, I guess, would have to depend on your use case and deployment situation. It was a good demo at least (and delegates at a Field Day event just love live demos). However, there was a concern that there might be some levels of US government security requirements Opengear’s full solution doesn’t quite reach … or at least, hasn’t been certified in yet.

Opengear isn’t the only player in the out-of-band management space. Admittedly, I haven’t seen any of the other solutions, but as a delegate, I like that Opengear took criticism and comments from previous Field Day presentations and came back with something that directly addressed those issues. Someday, maybe I’ll get around to figuring out the “whats, wheres, and how much” for any solution I would implement for my own network. However … as the lateness of this article should attest (almost two months after Cisco Live 2024), I’m nothing if not an expert at procrastination.