Network and Infrastructure Management Solutions

The ZPE Systems journey

Since 2013, ZPE’s extensible, secure-by-design Nodegrid platform has served as the drop-in solution for achieving everything from remote troubleshooting to infrastructure-as-code, hyperautomation, and an isolated control plane that’s resilient to outages and cyberattacks. With direct input from Big Tech, we’ve perfected Nodegrid to help our customers achieve excellence by cutting their workloads, automating operations, and quickly patching and recovering from ransomware. We now serve 6 out of the 10 top tech giants as well as 400 other valued customers.

How our customers use Nodegrid to improve remote access, resilience, and security

Use case: Gen 3 OOB and IMI for hyperscale data centers

An out-of-band management network (a.k.a., an isolated management infrastructure, as written by CISA) gives admin access to devices via a fully independent network, removing management interfaces from the production network. This mitigates the risk of human error taking your production network offline while preventing malicious actors from laterally accessing management infrastructure. IMI simplifies and accelerates remediation, and Gen 3 serial consoles offer a drop-in approach to deploying an IMI. 

Nodegrid IMI is a CISA-defined best practice for hyperscale data centers because it:

• Provides 24/7 remote access to your vital data center infrastructure, even if your WAN link goes down, so you can troubleshoot and recover without expensive truck rolls.
• Allows you to fight through cyberattacks using full remote access to isolate, cleanse, and recover production gear without exposing yourself.
• Lets you avoid performance impacts on the production network and end-users by performing resource-intensive network orchestration on the IMI’s dedicated management plane.

Use case: Gen 3 OOB and IMI for colocations

Managing colocation deployments often involves hours of on-site work and ongoing maintenance, as well as significant overhauls to adapt to new use cases. Nodegrid’s Gen 3 OOB via IMI is a multi-function device that shrinks the stack to save valuable rack space in colocation deployments. The open Nodegrid OS integrates into any automation, IaC, or DevOps environment for zero-touch deployments and true lights-out management, reducing on-site work and ongoing maintenance. The extensible OS and modular hardware also allow you to address new requirements with code or simple maintenance.

Nodegrid IMI is crucial to colocation data centers because it:

• Enables plug-n-play deployments with a secure environment dedicated to Day 0 – 3 operations.
• Puts operations on autopilot with support for automation, IaC, and DevOps, regardless of your environment, for a true lights-out management approach.
• Allows you to meet changing requirements with the extensible Nodegrid OS and modular hardware that allow you to deploy the apps and services you need, anywhere, anytime.

Use case: Scalable IMI for branch & remote edge

Branch operations have inflated device stacks, complex admin processes, and limited support for automation, spreading lean IT teams too thin. Nodegrid & ZPE Cloud solve these challenges by eliminating single-purpose devices, centralizing administrative control, and enabling automation for any skill level. You get the agility to deploy on demand using a secure platform that scales to the needs of your team and your business.

Nodegrid IMI provides consolidation & high availability at the branch and edge by:

• Consolidating 6+ functions into one device to collapse your stack with an agile solution that’s easy to deploy and adaptable to your needs.
• Centralizing access at each site with a single point-of-entry that makes jobs point-and-click simple while minimizing the attack surface.
• Reducing manual and repetitive tasks by allowing you to safely test and deploy automation based on your skill level.

ZPE Systems was the first to market with an out-of-band solution built on an x86-64bit open platform. Other notable innovations and achievements include:

• Docker, GuestOS, and Kubernetes orchestration built into an OOB solution
• Auto-sensing serial ports to alleviate the need for serial dongles
• Thermal and environmental CPU throttling and self-shutdown protection
• Patented 96-port density serial device (Patent No. 9,905,980) 
• Integrated TPM security on OOB
• Resilient scalable SSL mesh cluster to avoid a single point of failure
• Support for Python, Restful API, Ansible, Chef, and Puppet automation
• Full routing stack (OSPF, BGP, RIP) on serial consoles
• Natural search via Elastic Search
• Multi-vendor OOB (serial, IPMI, KVM, VM, and power)
• 10G network connectivity support on OOB
• HTML5 browser-in-a-container for secure viewer
• Failover integration with dynamic DNS
• Extensible and scriptable actionable data commands
• Encrypted storage

For a full list of features and technologies included in the Nodegrid platform, please reach out online or call 1-844-4ZPE-SYS.

ZPE’s people-friendly network management solutions reduce complexity to create a Zero Pain Ecosystem that works for you. Book a free Nodegrid demo to see our network and infrastructure management solutions in action.