Out-of-band infrastructure

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about telecommunications infrastructure. For the children's television program, see Oobi.

The concept of out-of-band infrastructure (OOBI) has been used throughout the telecom industry for voice communication since the mid-1950s. Having a critical requirement to always provide dial-tone for health and safety reasons, the telecom industry created elaborate mechanisms which allowed quick service restoration using alternative communication pathways which were physically and logically separate from the voice traffic itself. This early concept of a distinct 'control path' is considered the foundation of out-of-band infrastructures and simply put, refers to the ability to establish distinct remedial control paths adjacent to production communications pathways.

In the early 1980s, the concept of out-of-band was adapted for its natural application across the emerging data transmission network structures being introduced with the onset of Ethernet and cost-effective wide area networks. It was recognized that this out-of-band alternative pathway was a key requirement in service availability, and many of the lessons learned within the telecom industry for the previous 30 years could be easily applied. Some of the earliest implementations of a data network Out-of-Band structure included the attachment of a single modem to any given server- in essence creating a very small Out-of-Band Infrastructure. Vendors such as IBM, DEC, HP and Data General made very lucrative service businesses by providing such out-of-band tools as subscription-based services products. The ability to remotely interact with servers that were otherwise compromised was dramatic and gave rise to the growth of Out-of-Band as a tool for data networks.

Beginning in the year 2000, the concept was formalized by an early Out-of-Band Infrastructure for data pioneer Cyclades Corp. It was quite clear that this technology was quickly becoming a core IT requirement when dealing with service-levels across hundreds or thousands of geographically dispersed IT assets. OOBI as it has been coined by Cyclades Corp., uses many of the same concepts and provides similar features to the telecom industry's Out-of-Band Infrastructures. Vendors of OOBI solutions began offering these cost-effective alternatives to local administration for data system and network management. Just as in the past, a data OOBI provides alternate paths into the production infrastructure for the purpose of allowing disconnected assets to be remotely reconnected and subsequently returned to normal operation, in most cases eliminating the need for costly local administration. Some OOBI implementations include inherent enterprise-class security while others are constrained to the attributes of limited or proprietary mechanisms. An OOBI can improve operational efficiencies, cut costs, improve productivity and, in many cases, improve service levels and asset availability. Conceptually, data OOBIs virtually guarantee a data dial-tone.

Today, a data OOBI is typically implemented using serial Console, KVM, IPMI/iLo/DRAC/RSA/Alom baseboard management controllers and intelligent power strips - often with an OOBI Manager which subsequently integrates into traditional infrastructure IN-BAND management tools such as HP Openview, Computer Associates, BMC and Tivoli

[edit] See also

• Out-of-band management
• Headless