Opengear recently installed a solution for a global cruise company to give network engineers access to network devices on cruise ships out in the ocean rather waiting for them to get back to shore or dry land – saving them time and money.
The value of trade shows for securing new business is well known in the channel – but it also pays to stay to the very end because you never know when you might have a conversation that proves the catalyst for a big contract.
Dirk Schuma, sales manager EMEA North at Opengear, knows this only too well. He recounts a story about Opengear’s booth at the 2024 edition of Cisco Live Europe. In the last hour of the last day of the event, the Opengear team were thinking about packing up and heading home when Diogo Almeida, head of network, connectivity and infrastructure at AIDA Cruises (part of Carnival Cruises) stepped onto the stand.
“He was looking at our portfolio, which we still had sitting there as a showcase and said, ‘This is what I need.’ I was like ‘Okay’ and we started talking,” says Dirk.
Diogo explained that AIDA had 11 cruise ships that needed out-of-band connectivity as when the ships were out on the ocean, the team back on land had no way to access the IT equipment onboard. “On the ships, staff can make repairs if something fails hardware-wise or needs replacing, but they couldn’t do software patches or similar,” says Dirk.
“He said it would be great if they could access those devices from their shore locations.”
Smart solution
Dirk knew that Opengear could provide the right solution. Two weeks after that initial conversation, Opengear sent over some demo equipment, and AIDA downloaded the company’s Lighthouse centralised management platform. Then, following some technical sessions with AIDA’s networking team, within another two weeks Opengear’s Smart Out-of-Band solution was running on a test ship. Tests were first run in dry dock, then on the ocean.
“The Smart Out-of-Band solution does what they want,” says Dirk. “They have two data centres on the boat and various IT rooms in different fire zones where they need to access the network equipment, switches and firewalls they have there. In a normal data centre accessing this equipment is easy via regular connectivity links, but with a ship in the middle of the ocean you need a Starlink connection to them.”
Following the successful proof of concept, Dirk says the overall deployment to the whole fleet of 11 ships was completed within nine months of that first conversation. “They are now remotely managing their network equipment, and the AIDA team are super happy because they don’t need to send their network engineers around the world saving them time and money – not to mention the onboard cabins taken up by the AIDA team,” he adds. “They have access to the Opengear devices and the connected downstream equipment 24/7 and can install software patches and fix issues whenever necessary. They have access to every network and its equipment installed. Now, they are considering enlarging that solution to include the onboard entertainment, production and TV systems, which currently are not managed by Opengear.”
To put the scale of the demands into context the smallest ship in the fleet supports nearly 16,000 operational IP devices, plus personal devices used by more than 2,000 passengers and 600 crew members.
Opengear now provides reliable remote access to over 64,000 network devices across AIDA’s fIeet, even if a ship’s primary network is offline.
The Opengear solution has also brought costs savings for AIDA. “AIDA’s headquarters are in Rostock in Northern Germany, but their cruise ships go around the world,” explains Dirk. “If something happened to the network equipment or to a switch or firewall, before, somebody had to jump on a plane, fly to that location, stay onboard to replace the hardware and test it, and that cost alone is more than buying one of the Opengear console server devices and putting it on a ship. My take is that if you save just one trip, especially for a network manager or network administrator, the whole solution is paid off.”
Out of Band advantages
While this is an extreme example, it shows what Out of Band Management can do for customers of all sizes. “If a customer has a distributed network infrastructure regardless of size, their central IT team want to be able to securely access and manage the network to make it more resilient,” says Dirk. “From core data centres, edge sites like branch offices, production sites around the country, continent or globe. A Smart out-of-band solution is perfect because it gives the ability to securely access, manage and monitor all this network equipment from wherever you are.
“If you’re using our Lighthouse centralised management system like AIDA and many of our customers do, it gives you centralised access to all your Out-of-Band infrastructure and the connected devices behind and helps you in your daily work.
“For example, Opengear release a new firmware for the hardware every quarter, plus security patches if needed. When we release new firmware, customers must deploy it to stay compliant and on top of all security requests they have. How do you do that if, as in AIDA’s case, the ships are out on the ocean? With a centralised management system and a 4G/5G cellular or satellite connection, you can do this easily. You just upload this to the Lighthouse server or to the management server once, set a time to roll out those patches, and the system does it for you. It’s not only accessing those devices, but managing and monitoring those devices, which is a huge boost to their efficiency and flexibility.”
Speed, flexibility and resilience are the three key factors that customers are looking for in most vertical markets, Dirk adds. “We have customers from almost every vertical market, who could be managing a few sites to global deployments with thousands of devices and the general objective of our customers is the same – to find a solution that is easy, fast and resilient, to help me manage my network equipment,” he says.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s a governmental organisation, a bank, insurance company, retail or transportation company. They have a distributed network that they want to remotely manage and control securely; the approach from all these organisations is the same. The bottom line is, everybody is looking for a secure remote and resilient way to give their network administrators a better way to manage the network, and that’s what we do. This is why our customers and partners rely on our Smart Out-of-Band solutions and trust Opengear.”
