OpenGear Resilience gateway for ISPs
Some quick notes and screenshots from the OpenGear Resilience Gateway https://opengear.com/products/acm7000-resilience-gateway . The model I am working with is the ACM7004-2-L. It has 4 serial Cisco Straight pinout, Dual 1 GbE Ethernet, Global 4G LTE-A Pro cellular, 2 DIO, and 2 output ports.
So what does this thing do and what can it do for you as an ISP? At the basic level, this is a console server with multi wan capability. What this means is when the crap hits the fan you should be able to login to this device across the internet and see what your switches and routers are doing across a console connection. In most ISP scenarios they are bringing in their internet connections from another provider and landing it on a switch or a router. As most followers of this blog know I am a fan of switch-centric based setups. this means your transport and internet connections are landed on a switch or switches and then a router on a stick attaches to these switches.
So why would you need this setup? Not every POP site justifies, or has available multiple transport or internet connections. Imagine you have a switch plugged in and that switch doesn’t come back from a reboot or power event? Without a console server such as this you are driving to the site and plugging in a console cable to see what is going on. With this you can access the device over on of the multiple wan connections, including a cellular connection to gain console access.
Even in redundant setups, a console server can give you insight into what is going on with a router or switch. You can access the console port without ever having to drive. Is the switch booting? Is it getting stuck on a bootloader somewhere? This is all information you can gain from the console port.
Some Screenshots of the Gui. One of the things I like is the dashboard. I am a sucker for dashboards. One reason I am is on any new piece of gear I am reviewing or learning a well thought out dashboard will give me much of the information I need to know. Are my interfaces up? Have VPN connections established? These can help me learn as well as save time troubleshooting
Some interesting notes about the features of this device. It does have environmental status indicators. If you have a device that you can plug into one of the console ports either via USB or rj45 console you can use the gateway to monitor this. Couple this with the Nagios and/or SNMP integration you now have a temperature, door alarm, or other sensors for your remote sites.
Other notable features include Digital Input and output, remote syslog monitoring, IPSec and OpenVPN, and many other features. If you are deploying lots of these Opengear has a Lighthouse Server for centralized management.
One of the best things I like about this is you are able to access the console server via the web interface. And the best thing? No Java required. This saves from remembering complicated port numbers, for when you ssh and want to access a specific device.
So how am I using this in a network? this device is going at a data center. The client has two cisco switches and two mikrotik routers which will plug into this. It will have an in-band wan connection on a management vlan directly into both routers. If both of these routers are down the gateway has a cellular backup with a IPSEC VPN to a router in a remote data center. You could always switch this up by connecting your second ethernet port into a secondary ISP in the data center. Some networks have a management router where management devices such as this plug into. I have done this with Mikrotik 4011s and it works just fine. I can plug an in-band connection into the mikrotik and a secondary ISP such as a cable or other ISP in the data center.
The cost may discourage some folks. On Amazon, these are just under a thousand dollars. If you need more console ports the price goes up from there. To them, I say what are the costs of downtime and your time. For this client, the closest tech is an hour away. I am two hours away. If a simple firmware or bootloader command fixes a switch not booting and turns 2 hours of minimum downtime into 5 minutes that is a huge win.
Look for a video overview soon.
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