Secure Management With Lantronix At InteropNet's SDN Lab

InteropNet provides wired and wireless network services for Interop attendees and exhibitors. A team of vendor partners and volunteers designs and builds the network from the ground up each year.

Lantronix was a vendor partner for InteropNet's SDN Lab at Interop Las Vegas 2015. The SDN Lab explored software defined networking concepts and technologies, and demonstrated interoperability among a variety of vendor products.

Vishal Kakkad, director, product management, at Lantronix, shared the company's experiences in the lab.

Our primary role in the SDN Lab was to provide secure console access to network infrastructure equipment from companies such as Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, NEC, and HP. This was accomplished via the Lantronix SLC 8000 advanced modular console manager, which offers secure in-band and out-of-band management.

In several instances, we coordinated with other companies to install their gear in advance, before installing our equipment in the SDN Lab, as our product was the last piece of the puzzle before the lab went live.

In other cases, we installed our devices in advance for others to leverage, since many of the participants were working diligently until the last minute before all systems went live for the event.

In the SDN Lab, the SLC 8000 provided remote access to servers, routers, switches, storage devices, and other equipment in the racks through their console ports. We also offered field-installable USB I/O modules for quick connections to equipment that supported USB console ports.

Out-of-band access provides critical data to operators and allows for central management, monitoring, and troubleshooting of the equipment.

Additionally, an array of our Lantronix Spiders were used to deliver scalable and non-blocking KVM-over-IP access to gain desktop and BiOS level control of headless servers, including VMware servers.

The Spider provided a simple cascading solution for rack deployment, while the vSLM central management software, running on the lab's VM server, aggregated the Spiders onto a single browser for quick access and visibility.

Each Spider was connected via USB and video to the back of the servers to allow access in preparation for any hardware malfunctions or operating system instability at any point in time.

All the participants had two main goals: keep pace with the rapid deployment of the lab, and stay on top of any problems that arose during the show. With many disparate pieces working together in the lab, it was critical to be able to monitor and manage all of the equipment to ensure harmony and prevent chaos.

We were thrilled with the event, the lab, and the response from vendors and attendees alike.