When planning an out-of-band management solution, it’s best to consider your options for the out-of-band connection including what’s already available onsite and how much bandwidth is needed. A flexible out-of-band solution like Uplogix will be able to work with a wide variety of connection options including dial-up, cellular, fiber and satellite modems. A secondary Ethernet connection can be used as an out-of-band connection to a DSL modem or secondary network.

Today, out-of-band links over a robust LTE cellular connection can be used as a backup router for primary network traffic. Uplogix calls this WTF: WAN Traffic Failover. Here is how it works:

• A WAN router experiences an outage (A) that prevents it from sending local traffic back to the headquarters via its WAN.
• Both the router and the Uplogix Local Manager (LM) detect the outage. The LM brings up its LTE cellular out-of-band connection when the Pulse test fails and the router changes its default route to be the Uplogix LM (B).
• The router sends all (or select) traffic through a VPN over the cellular network back to the NOC while the WAN is down (C). The LM builds a VPN over the cellular WAN back to the NOC that is used for all network management traffic to and from the remote site.
• The router and the LM continue to monitor primary WAN connectivity. When the router detects that the WAN connection is restored, it changes the default gateway for its traffic back to the WAN. When the LM detects a healthy WAN connection, it tears down its VPN and the cellular LTE out-of-band connection, and returns to communicating over the WAN.

Out-of-band is more than just an alternate path to remote gear, it’s a smarter way to manage your network and eliminate downtime.

By providing persistent connectivity to the devices you need to manage, Uplogix enables you to:

• Maintain management access and control over distributed locations, even when the network is down or degraded.
• With WAN Traffic Failover, user traffic continues to flow over the OOB link, eliminating downtime without the need for additional redundant networks
  and gear.
• Enforce security policies even during network outages to maintain compliance.
• Log all changes and the results of those changes, and inspect the logs in real-time for problems.
• Continuously monitor critical statistics and user interactions with managed devices via an always-on, serial connection.

For more information on the Uplogix out-of-band platform, visit the out-of-band access page.