this is the art of network engineering podcast in this podcast we'll explore tools technologies and talented people we aim to bring new information that will expand your skill sets and toolbox and share the stories of fellow network engineers welcome to the art of network engineering i am aj murray at no blinky blinky and i am so excited to be recording our second ever episode live in person from our airbnb here in asheville and it's the first episode we're all in the same room yesterday we recorded we were without tim he was still making his way down here uh but i i'm so happy this is uh an unbelievable moment in the history of this podcast a very long time coming so uh why don't we start with tim how are you doing buddy tim burtino well i'm much better now should i give a recap yeah yeah yeah please so i've had a little bit of extra time on my hands in the last 48 hours so you wrote a bunch of intros is what i'm hearing i didn't do anything i didn't do anything productive um yeah i got stuck in new york uh so i i did some reading i did some other stuff like that but luckily aj and dan came to pick me up because i wasn't even able to fly into asheville i got a couple hours away and uh they spent a long day really appreciate it i'm glad to be here i would have been super bummed if i had to turn around go home yeah yeah i think i think that's mutual i think we all would have been bummed if you had to go because you were kind of almost calling it you know oh i'm glad it wasn't celebration oh he yeah don't worry he didn't make it so close yeah you should have seen us all just sitting there on our phones like okay we gotta find a flight for him let's see we'll delta that was so cool i mean you all were helping my wife was helping and ultimately i got here late but got here better late than never so thank you thanks for coming man andy laptop permit ipandy.com andy i love seeing your smile in person he's sitting next to me i'm so happy tim's here and your hair looks even better when i it's like you know three feet away from my head i can see every little individual hair we're going to do a little class here in a little bit he's going to teach me i don't have enough hair to do it i don't think but what do you put in that thing that thing looks like a helmet yeah do you put your helmet on in the morning like so aj i'm good it's it's been a great trip um tim camped out in front of my bedroom hilarious so creepy so if for those of you listening if you hadn't seen it go back to our twitter timeline you will see a picture of tim selfieing in front of andy's door he's like behind this door is a sleeping and everybody everybody thought that was heartfelt and lexie just said it was creepy but with our with our a1 account you're in like this weird lighting with like you know your shadows like behind you on each lexi that's just my face you look stoked to be there though so i was so it's it's super exciting i'm so glad tim made it uh asheville was incredible we had the chris denny tour which was great oh yeah we had some coffee with uh some friends this morning which is so so great that felt really nice to like meet some yeah people who've come here for the first time i felt like i had to get that out of my system just to kind of like shake the heebie-jeebies yeah yeah i've been sitting by the fire pit we've had some barbecue it's it's just been a great you know it's been a great time absolutely and over to dan at howdy packet howdy how are you doing dan i'm doing wonderful i've i've had a latte no no we changed it no it was a latte yeah coffee does the same thing to me and some bagels at the ultra coffee yeah yeah and got to meet some of the some of the the community and uh that was really cool all right oh yeah yeah i'm kind of glad we did that because i think it would have been more of a shock factor if we waited right till the actual event you know just like how all these people are here so i was glad to kind of get that out of the way and last but not least lexi at track and pacer hello how are you i'm good i'm just really excited that we're all here it's a little recording will never be the same again yeah it's weirder today than it was yesterday is that the 10 factor i think it might be yeah i'm like feeling the butterflies i don't usually like butterflies for podcasts but right yeah i'm excited this has been a great trip so far well i i am very excited because this episode is sponsored by open gear a digital company if you're thinking about an out of band solution please consider open gear and reach out to them today go to opengear.com and check out their offerings and we'll make sure we'll get you in touch with some wonderful people over there and speaking of wonderful people at opengear i am very excited to introduce ram team he's a solutions architect at opengear uh and uh welcome to the show and because i can i want to shake your hand hey good to be here good to be here uh so ranting um what we want to do is talk to you about your career and what from what i understand you've been in open gear for a long time no just just a little bit so uh why don't we start there when did you when did you join well first let's start it what do you do at opengear today sure uh now currently i'm a solutions architect so i do a little bit of everything when it comes to helping customers succeed in their deployments okay um that can be you know initial troubleshooting of a deployment recommendations designs um actually fully deploying a prod environment for them whatever they need you know i'm just there for a pre and post cells very cool yeah very cool soup to nuts a to z i love it yeah that's great uh and and so when did you join open gear and what was your your first position there oh i joined open gear august of 2011. oh wow okay wow yeah i'm almost hitting 11 years here soon nice very cool yeah yeah so um my first position was a manufacturing technician so i basically assembled the product um kind of put everything together was able to test it um you know back then we only had about two people um so we were in charge of shipping receiving um building testing trouble shooting was this like in your basement it was a basement basement it was like an upstairs of a building with enough room for literally three people wow that is so cool yeah yeah you started from the ground and now you're like a solutions architect like you know the products it sounds like inside out it's part of the journey right that's what it's all about yeah so that's right it's all about the journey i i i messed that one up sorry i think that really speaks to the culture of the company right well yeah really promote from within and people that are really willing to put their time and effort in really get rewarded that's really cool to see oh absolutely i think that option is there in a lot of places and um i actually am still really good friends with a lot of the guys in the manufacturing floors and um most of the folks that were there when i started are still there which is really awesome i hope it's a bigger room now yeah it's like well they're fitting six people yeah but and not just in the manufacturing like in the accounting in in support in all different aspects um almost everybody sticks around once they join the company which which tells it tells you a lot about the company itself oh yeah yeah i think it speaks volumes yeah absolutely so how many how many when you when you started like company-wide how many people were there roughly company wide i don't know the exact number but i know that i was employing number seven and i was replacing employee number six in the u.s so wow so we're looking at seven six seven people in the u.s and i want to say there were about 10 15 engineers at the time in australia brisbane australia is kind of where our engineering headquarter was so how did you find opengear um i found opengear through school so i had um they had applied for a take i was actually getting my cna at the time and i ended up not getting it because i got so busy with school and um and finding this job but i had applied originally for opengear back in march through the tech school that i was attending and uh i due to different circumstances i ended up not taking the position and i moved to you know being a installer satellite dish network installer oh yeah so i did that for a little while and um about six months later i had um decided that it's time to kind of get into something with tech even if you have to get on the ground level i kind of wanted to just be there for a new company and learn and grow with it so i i had applied and it was perfect timing because the other person that was in the manufacturing floor had decided to move on so you know i fortunately got in at the perfect time before the job posting had even gone up so oh wow yeah and so when you when you had gone through the process previously did that kind of keep your name on the on the on the list there of like you know you coming back in yeah exactly i try not to you know burn any bridges or anything so i just you know i said this is this is a fantastic offer but uh right now i'm just gonna go and do this other thing uh and the uh the manager basically had my name down so when when the time come came for me to email him i emailed him and i said hey you know do you still have anything open as you guys are growing and he said perfect timing as a matter of fact you know my co-worker or my uh one of my employees is leaving and i'm when i was about to post the job so nice you know but why don't you come in and there was there was not even an interview at that point because i had already interviewed six months ago it was destiny absolutely yeah that's that's what it felt like so yeah so you found out about open gear through school can you talk to us a little bit more about that yeah yeah so it was just basically your your typical you know tech school that i was attending and um you know looking for jobs i had found the satellite installer job myself but after that i was just going to the school counselor seeing what kind of job posting they had and this is the one that they came up with that they said it's a networking company but it's not really a networking position but it might be a good way to get your foot in the door and that's kind of why i decided to take the position i applied and history from there yeah so now do you have a do you have a degree um i do so i have my mba um that i got probably a year ago so i went to school so i got my associates in networking although i never got my cna yeah you know i probably you know i don't remember all the cisco commands in it at this point but um it's okay neither do i yeah but after after about getting after after getting my associate i moved on to uh just working full-time and staying focused on that for a couple years okay then i went and got my bachelor's in cyber security and again took another couple years break um and then when i got my mba so opengear's been kind enough to kind of help me grow and as i grew into different positions i felt the need that i need to kind of educate myself and grow with the company okay so i i would just kind of move on and go to different classes and schools just to make sure i keep up was it difficult for you to balance all that it was time-wise yeah yeah it's it's it's hard to kind of work you know nine to five nine to six just depending on the position kind of the hours changed but yeah it's hard to do that and then right after that go to school and spend you know three four hours and then spend time with the family afterwards but yeah did you have a pretty good idea of what open gear was all about out of band management all that when you got into the company um originally when i applied yeah uh that's a that's a great question um no actually so when i applied i didn't even know what a console server was okay even though i was going to school to be a network engineer i had no idea what a console server was robted you got my attention when you said cable guy right so right for me well i can't i'm missing the same thing tell me the same thing i don't agree with you so why i might have missed it but why what pushed you from you know i'm installing satellites and i i won something like for me it was an injury i got hurt in the field and what was your transition did something happen or you just wanted more yeah that's a great question so i actually loved what i was doing as a satellite installer although in utah you know it can be difficult at times because you gotta go clean off the snow off the roof before you can install the satellite dish but um i had actually um put in my two weeks to go work at a different position which was for the highway um doing all of their um their lights and all the street lights for for the utah highway but uh what turned out to be if the job posting was for a uh like a network technician slash uh an uh electrical engineer to come in and kind of set up the lights set up the toll logos do all that stuff but when i got there um the job was not as described so basically they said oh five percent of your job is doing um electrical engineering and then 95 is just construction so get your hard hat on yeah and i uh i feel like that should have been a little more than fine print yeah it's like where's the network part yeah that's not how the interview was the interview was like in this little office and you had all these technical equipment and they were talking about the leds and the guy that i was replacing was there and you know within the first day that same night i emailed um the folks at opengear and i was like hey do you guys still have anything open so did you even start that oh yeah yeah yeah yeah i started it but after like a day of construction work i was like well not that there's anything wrong with construction just wasn't for me right um i just came home and i immediately applied for the other job and i let my manager know that you know i'm gonna move on because i got a different job good for you i mean i think i think a lot of people would be tempted to like maybe stay for six months and just like see you know i feel like that's that's maybe where i would tend towards with jobs but it's great that you like knew what you wanted and when it didn't seem like it was where you know you that job was going to be where you wanted to go you just said hey this is not for me and you moved on to where you needed to be i mean you set your own course that's great absolutely absolutely yeah i thought i thought aj kept short jobs but dang one day i feel great now i love dan in real life he's just slinging it dan has been roasting everybody and for anyone not watching i'm guessing aj did this strategically dan and andy are on opposite ends of the room right now strategically yeah i can't even see india let's see there you go there you go strategic is the word i would use for yeah uh so so rontine i i wanna uh you know talk to you about how did you make the leap right like you're working in manufacturing you're putting these things together you're also responsible for shipping them how did you make the jump into you know the next position yeah that's so that's a great question so um i i was i'm always a tinkerer when it comes to you know networking equipment electrical equipment you know things in that nature just i just love playing around with them configuring them so what would happen is a lot of the times we may have failures on the line or we may have power issues you know something need to be soldered on or off configuration would need to change so i would always be the one to raise my hand and say hey can i go off the line and kind of get these things fixed so as i got more and more comfortable with it i reached out to the support manager who at the time was just him and and one other guy doing the support and i said hey if you have any positions i'd be really interested i think i would be good at you know helping customers because i can fix these things i'm familiar with the cli i'm familiar with the ui and i can help customers walk through and troubleshoot things and in the you know with my school i had the background of of you know networking and windows and all the components that uh that a typical out-of-band user may be using so i brought that up and about probably six months later so three years into me working there um i got the job offer to to be a support engineer so thank you i i want to highlight that because i think a lot of people when they're working somewhere and they see a position they want they just like go i want that i really want that and then they think to themselves like how do i get there they might plot a course they might get it they might not but you set your intentions you made your intentions clear you went to the hiring manager and you said hey i want to work on your team here's here's why i want to work on your team and if there was any sort of gap in knowledge like let me know what i got to work on so i can get there like you clearly stated your intentions and six months later you got it absolutely nailed it yeah so many successful people that we talk to really take control of their own career right their own destiny yeah but it's awesome that you know you work at a company that they you have a crazy career path right yeah yeah like going from you know putting the boards together and all that and then become like the architect like that's a good career path yeah one what company like i i've been at my company for 10 years now and it's like that's what i hope we i can get to you know so yeah i think a lot of it is just speaking out and letting your intentions known yeah um and a lot of the time again i've i've been extremely fortunate that all the people that i've spoken with have been pretty open with what requirements are there are you know what you need to know to move on to the next position and you know i've always gone and learned it or gathered the information to make sure that i can meet those demands um with support for example i went and you know learned about ldap and tacacs and radius because that was one of them you went out of your way to learn things that you needed you mentioned that earlier right like whenever they needed something you you know you volunteered for it you were proactive about that yeah no just talk to boss senior architect i just got to plant that seed david yeah i'm gonna start using that word senior architect what'd you say nothing i sneezed so um what was what was the next position i don't wanna just keep asking that question so how many different positions have you held at opengear um so after this one i basically um i was in support for roughly about three and a half years maybe four years um and that's when um our our sales team so dan my manager reached out and said hey we're um growing our strategic account like dan yeah yeah like that hey dan hi dan they reached out and they said that they're growing their strategic accounts and they're looking for somebody who can kind of stay dedicated and focused on the customers environments instead of being so widespread into everything right so you would have you know only four or five accounts under your wings but you would do anything from again support to deployment to recommendations to even you know replicating some of the customers environments to make sure that they're all working as expected before they do the upgrade and patching oh wow things in that nature that's cool and that's that's kind of when i went from the support position into the sales engineer position and then um as as the company grew and grew and grew i i kind of just became the solutions architect for all of america's so not just our strategic accounts but i kind of handle anything that's that's technical but it's not really support related and anything that the customers need to to kind of help with their deployment or understand the product better yeah i i think that's really valuable too that that you came from the position that you did because it's like who better to ask a question about when you're putting stuff together you know yeah that's i see a lot of value in that so you went through a period where you were you know in school you're working jobs you're trying to balance everything um you know one of the big proponents that we are for is mental health right we talked about that a lot on the show so when you're when you're carrying that much how do you balance it all and then what do you do to like unwind and relax and that's that's a great question uh you know what's funny is um unwinding to me has always been just doing something that i love and makes me happy well i'm sure that's what it is for everybody but um when i was working and going to school i was actually pretty happy because i was kind of furthering my education and that was that was a rewarding thing for me the the biggest thing for me was when i get so drowned in work and and at my own doing because i love working so much that i end up realizing oh i've been working for 10 hours maybe i should take a break so when um when the pandemic hit it it kind of became pretty rough because you're at home and you're just kind of working as much as you can until you're kind of like your wife says it's dinner time so my unwinding became you know getting passionate about cooking or getting into you know brewing beers which you know we're in asheville so yeah everyone at the table their ear is perfect yeah and then you know just just playing video games and spending time with the family just just staying focused and trying to kind of close the laptop for a bit so you feel like you still had time to do that with your family work school everything like that is still there yeah absolutely i think it was there when i thought about it so that's one thing that i realized that you can get lost really fast if you don't focus and you realize that you're getting burnt or i'm sorry you don't realize that you're getting burnt until you're burnt so sometimes it's good to kind of step out of the box and you know again um i know i keep saying this but i'm fortunate enough to have really good managers and and dan has been a big proponent of me taking um taking time off and making sure that i'm focusing on my mental health and i'm not overworking myself because you know i'm sure he'll rather have me up and focused for you know eight to ten hours a day rather than just being you know in drag for 12 hours yeah so i'm hearing a message of like intentionally carving out time for like recovery basically absolutely absolutely just make sure that you're doing something um that's that's kind of yours um recently i kind of just joined a like a workout group right i'm not good at going to the gym and dedicating myself but i figure if i can join a group of people that are doing this then then i'm committing to them and it's a great way to kind of just put work aside go out do something that's healthy and and spend time with other people that that accountability is huge i mean we we all experienced that in the beginning when we started this podcast it came from a study group you know we all wanted to to get that next certification and once we started in the group it's like well you know it's one thing when i make a decision personally that i'm not going to study tonight and i'd rather relax but when now i have to answer to this guy and be like well i better read that chapter and prepare my presentation for next week because like i don't want to let my friends down now so that that accountability is huge he's not somebody you want to disappoint either no no no not at all i've learned if anything i've learned about in in person andy is i don't want to disappoint him so i feel real bad for you know making fun of him like i have this week but i do it out of love i really he's the guy that says i'm not mad at you but i'm disappointed i'm not angry i'm hurt but then i make fun of him again it's the physical distance it's all good yeah that's good all right uh so i i think now is a good time as any to start to change gears a little bit so um i see what you did there yeah see see uh so so let's talk about out-of-band management um you know we we have had an open gear episode before but um there's a lot of people that join us at various parts in our journey so why don't we briefly go over what is out of band management yeah absolutely so out-of-band is just basically getting you know it's it's your terminal server console server it's it's a way for you to connect to your remote devices to your networking equipment um when your in-band connection is down right so when your network is down when when the switch is down it's not responding you need you need an alternate path and uh opengear kind of draws that for you whether that's through a second network connection whether it's through cellular whether it's through you know some cloud hosted centralized manager it gives you that alternate path so you can get to your equipment yeah let me give a little story that happened not too long i told aj about this uh earlier but uh so we had a situation where we didn't have out-of-band management right and um so there's switch a and switch b and the way that they're both connected to each other through a poor channel and uh the way we were coming in to switch b was through switch a through that port channel that port channel got shut down on switch b by doing a shut but we shut down the port channel that we were connected to and then guess what we had to make a little trip to the data center yeah that's called cutting your arm off yeah yeah or sawing off the branch you're standing yeah yeah there's a visual yeah yeah exactly so that's where out of ben would have really saved our bacon so do you have out of band now not yet romping i think i found your next one yeah yeah yeah i i uh i am working on that so and open gear is who i'm going after i've always experienced out of band as like my lifeline you know what i mean like even with code upgrades i'm managing a data center and when i reboot that box yep if you don't have out of band you're just sitting there with that ping waiting to come up again but when you have out of band you can see each console message you can see what's happening oh hell i'm in ramon like you wouldn't know that right it's nerve-wracking without it otherwise and even in other deployments like we've had a lot of data centers where we want to like bring up and i have to just configure a router ship it and then pray i hope when they plug this circuit and it comes up and then if it doesn't you got like you said send a tech out so it it's always been a lifeline for me out of band you know what what's really interesting is um there's so many different use cases when it comes to at a band and you can have um we're kind of there for you for your first day when you're doing the installation where you're doing the configuration but we're also there for your worst day when when things are just completely down and you need access but what's really interesting is a lot of our customers um a lot of our strategic customers actually don't touch the network during maintenance window if they don't have adivan running so the very first step in in their instructions is verify that you can get to the console port through opengear before actually moving on to the next step and that way they're that they're never down because even if they do go down they can immediately get through console and bring it back up i'm not gonna name names but there's a hyperscaler not too long ago that brought everything down and apparently they're out of band wasn't as out of band as they thought it was and they had to drive the data centers and get in so i mean i was just amazed that a company of that scale could didn't have out of band configured correctly if they did they would have got up a lot quicker oh yeah absolutely absolutely because i think there were some replication issues and and there was no way to get into those switches and yeah again the the console port is like one your one true connection regardless of the state of the product we kind of provide that so there's lots of different out-of-band solutions out of there there's plenty of different console server manufacturers what is the open gear difference yeah absolutely um i think there is a lot of of companies out there but there's not a lot that are the trend setters right so we kind of did the cellular at a band we kind of embedded that product in it's it's all built in it's you know it's your smart ad band we have a lot of built-in smart features in the product that offer more than just a console server and those can vary greatly depending on your use case which is kind of why i love my job is is one day i can go in and you know a customer just wants at a ban with a cellular ip that they can gut um connect to and and jump into the console ports so that's like day one and and another customer wants full-on automation and and we offer that as well through our centralized uh management you can literally configure a switch i won't name names but you can configure a full-on switch router um all through our automation system if you're starting your automation journey right as as i've been listening to you guys as podcasts i know that a lot of network engineers are kind of at the preface at the beginning of starting the journey but that some of them are not fully there and we're kind of there to to help you with that and we're kind of there to be a part of it so we can have cases and this is this is i think what one of the biggest differences is is if you are fully automated um we're there to kind of be that transport layer to just get you from a to b um if you're at the beginning of your journey we're there to help you with setups you know we can give you python examples we can give you ansible examples um and if you're kind of in the middle we can you you can utilize our examples and our centralized manager to run those ansible playbooks so it's kind of like we have a little bit for whatever path or how far down the journey you are which i think is a huge difference and you meet the customer where they are which is pretty awesome and unique because i feel like a lot of big vendors are like well here's the thing and here's all the iron you need and you have the software you need and here's the licenses and if you don't do any of this you can't use it it's not going to work but you meet them where they are and have customized solutions which is really like awesome but very customer focused right accenture absolutely absolutely and i think that's that that oh again it's the culture of the company it's it's maki it's not the you know come buy this product and you know goodbye kind of thing right so we have we have dedicated cells engineers we have you know like people like me who kind of help with with pocs and things that may not already be in the software and you're kind of just if you want hand holding we can hold your hand throughout the whole feature throughout the whole installation or if you're kind of familiar with the product and just want to run with it yourself you're more than welcome to as well can i just say that as someone i i can't probably lean on this for too much longer but as someone fairly new everyone's laughing at me as someone fairly new to networking who hasn't really thought about out of band that much um i have to say that like finding out you can use like you know a cellular network for that kind of blew my mind yeah i want to unpack that too because i think one thing that's getting to be really cumbersome if you're doing it manually is new site new equipment turn up and with most companies trying to do more with less there's less people it takes a lot of time to ship equipment to a central site to configure manually and then ship out so how can how can opengear help with new site new configuration turn up without having to get equipment shipped to a central site configure it first and then ship it to the ultimate destination great question so we actually have um a hundred different ways that you we can we can help with that um start with one yeah you can't give me that many options i'll never get anything done so also i was saying that uh we actually recently have uh one of our customers who's kind of deploying this whole zero trust network environment and they they don't want to any longer ship units to a centralized location and minimally configure them because that breaks the whole zero trust circle right so they want to just ship completely factory defaulted boxes to a site rack it up and then have it configured but that usually requires somebody on site doing the configuration which costs a lot of money so um with this particular customer what we're doing is we're we're setting up their console server their console server reaches out to the centralized manager and gets itself configured using the cellular network so all they have to do is just run two commands to be able to connect to the centralized manager and at that point everything else is still fully unconfigured default state once they're at the state we can literally push uh full-on configurations and stand up a dhcp server that can ztp the rest of the environment without without you having to worry about anything right so we have some sam again we have sampling ansible playbooks i've been kind of working with the customer to make sure that they get deployed correctly and once the dhcp server is local you don't have to worry about pushing that configuration or firmware file down a hundred different times if you have a hundred different switches so we can host all of those files all those configurations that's for your automation heavy users and if you have you know a network engineer that's just beginning the journey you just plug everything into the console port and then they can jump in through the cellular centralized manager and just manually configure things um either way it gets the job done it's just a matter of how much work you want to put ahead of time and how much automation you want so let's go back to the basics there how do you tie that device to the customer's instance of their their central management is it through a serial number is it some sort of id on the open gearbox that how does that work yeah absolutely so currently our centralized manager is is hosted by the customer and that can be hosted somewhere in the cloud or in a virtual in virtualized environment locally so we're actually tying it by basically telling the console server to go and dial that ip address with a certain set of credentials and once they dial out um the centralized manager will have all the configuration ready so it will uh push all the configuration through it will you know enable a dhcp server if you want enable a tftp server if you want so it's not just the console server at this point right where where your ztp where your file hosting where your console server where your you know everything that you i need your at a band essentially it's a toolbox yeah yeah that's a good way to put it and our um our newer platform supports um things like python and docker so if you really want to get fancy with it you can deploy your own docker container um or again we can provide samples or poc any kind of docker container that you want um because we have some customers that you know want to do an end map of the entire environment behind the open gear to see who's up who's down who's awake wait you're running docker containers on the open gear device yeah you absolutely can show off you know we we kind of at as the company was growing and um since i've i've been there for a little while i i we we kind of grew on not out of but alongside of just being a terminal server and a console server we kind of saw this this journey of users and network engineers needing more than just terminal access right they wanted to make their everyday life easier and what better device to put in a lot of your toolbox and toolsets than the device that's your in-band and at-a-band connection so we're kind of your failure point whenever when everything else fails we're still there right so we're there through cellular or second in-band connection and because of that we have that proximity and when we have that proximity why not put all your tools in the one thing that you know you can get to when everything else goes down so yeah okay but can it run minecraft you know funny you should say that that is the first thing i installed was a docker container with a minecraft server i installed the tacx one and i installed a counter-strike one no servers yeah just just to kind of like see if it's possible i never connected to it because there's no you know there's not a lot of gpu processing so i'm not sure how that would handle it yeah yeah but i'm sure it can do it to some aspect yeah that's great that's great so so one of the things that you picked up on and you know we've had this conversation with opengear before and i just want to highlight this like you guys really care about the network engineer and you look to your customers the network engineers for feedback on the product and when they come to you and say i like this but it would be really cool if you had this feature or maybe we could just you know add this tool set and make it compatible and you guys go straight to the bench and figure out how you can get that in there absolutely absolutely and and one really cool thing is um because now we we have on a new platform we have you know things like python and docker um you we we do we do that in the software so you can you know customers come in and say oh well i'm looking for this feature um we're implementing this new automation or we're implementing this new product and currently your product isn't supported right or it's not compatible what we usually do is we'll kind of solution engineer solution architect around it and provide like a docker container as a short-term solution just to make sure that the customer gets going and then we'll kind of hand that over to our engineering team who can eventually deploy that proper in firmware a good example of that is our new product initially didn't support a tftp server right and again having your tftp files and having a tftp server local to the um all your switches and routers is pretty handy especially inside and out of band box uh so what we had done is we initially just wrote a quick docker container or pulled down an alpine container and installed tftpd on it and that resolved the customer immediately and about three to four months later we we actually had a proper tftp server in the product as well that's really cool that's really cool how do you keep that direct line with your customers for research and development do you have specific high-profile customers that you really keep i'm sure you keep a good relationship with all customers but how do you how do you really get to the point of knowing both where the industry's going and what your customers really want yeah great point so that a lot of that is our marketing and product management team kind of doing research seeing where the industry's going um um you know looking at articles things like garnet just to see where where the information or where the path is for network engineers because we want to make sure that you know we're the network engineers best friend we want to be there for them whatever the case whether it's the initial installation as i mentioned or whether it's your worst day and um on top of that we have regular cadence call with with a lot of our high profile customers and we see it as a partnership right so this is this is a growing environment even with our strategic accounts they're still growing they're still deploying new features new products and we want to be there as a partner to kind of help them grow and if we can offer a solution to make their life easier then then it's a win-win for both of us y'all seem to be doing it well because i've seen a lot of major vendors recently especially with the automation aspect of things um seems to new products sort of come out and the message is sort of like yeah i can do all this stuff and then when you dig a little deeper they'll be like well you know it almost it can almost do that stuff like we're so close to getting that you know and fixed in the next release kind of thing but you all seem to be listening pretty well yeah yeah we try to um a really fun example was recently we had a customer deploying um palo alto firewalls and they want to be able to arm they want to be able to get up a little bit he's got power you're speaking today so they want to be able to configure these boxes uh remotely and especially in cases of rmas right so uh palo alto has its own centralized manager that can fully configure your firewall but how do you get the firewall to talk to the centralized manager if it's a brand new firewall that's been rma'd so um i've worked with the customer and set up a poc where they can literally plug in their palo alto through the console port and this is all automation through console as well so not only doing ztp but you know we um thank thank you to net mico and kirk buyers and all the folks that kind of do all the all the automations in over python but we were able to do a super simple python script that when you plug in your brand new palo alto to the open gear it's able to recognize the port label as like a default palo alto name because it's not going to have a host name and and kick off a api call to your centralized server and say hey on opengear port 8 we have a brand new palo alto in there could you go and configure it and then your automation server would kick off the python script that would go and do the initial configuration on the palo alto and have it reach out to its centralized manager to get the rest of the config so that's super cool yeah so what i'm also hearing from that too is it can like let's say if we're trying to ship out sites right and if you have uh your open gear box configured to where you know that when this equipment is deployed that router is going to be on port 1 which is going to be on port 2 all that stuff but like let's say kind of your example earlier about um you don't want to have it shipped to your hq configure it send it out there you just want the equipment shipped out to wherever it's going but if you have your your automation set up to like what you're just saying all you have to do is plug it in then it can it can put the config on there right yeah yeah absolutely yeah we have some customers that do full-on configurations over the console port um because again with with netmeco um we're we're just the transport right you've a lot of the um network engineers have already written the code to do the configuration this is needed to get there and on top of that we have things to make things a little bit easier so once you have a configured switch or router and you're deploying a product or you're deploying an opening gear afterwards then we have things like auto discovery or auto port discovery that can go in and fetch all the port labels that way you don't have to figure out what's on port one or you don't have to necessarily ensure with the on-site engineer or on-site technician that they connected the right switch to the right serial port yeah because sometimes even like in our case uh like we have remote text but sometimes it's actually like the receptionist yep you know whoever that may be they might be like okay we need you to plug this cable into port uh port one or unplug the power cable and they're like is that port eight and it's like no that's not port eight that's the that's the black cable that comes out of the back you know like uh but but you know they just don't know that's not their world right and so you're saying that it actually you can make it to where it doesn't even matter what port you plug it in it can figure out correct correct yeah the auto discovery feature kind of just connects to the port and tries to read the host name which is which is really really cool we actually started this probably five six years ago as a custom bash script and then it kind of grew into this full-blown future which again goes back to my example of you know we're listening to customers we're we're providing assistance we're providing new features and as as the future gets fully baked in we get we get it you know engineered and added to the product so all of our users can't use it so yeah and to kind of go back a little bit you were talking about being the friendship of the uh or being a friend of the network engineer i will say one thing that stuck with me when we were talking to opengear or dan specifically um behind closed doors he he was like we want to be the friends yeah right and that that really stuck with me on it for like a sponsor right and and so that was really cool yeah yeah we we we want to make sure that that the network engineers life are are made easier and i think that if the network engineers are happy then they're more happy and that again it comes from sales marketing product management engineering and that's kind of the message of the company is we want to go where you're going um and we're here through through the entire journey yeah there's not a whole lot of value to anybody involved if it's if it's just a sell and walk away mentality i mean it may sound corny but building relationships is is really important that that's kind of where you get to learn where where new futures and new companies are going towards and again we have regular cadence call with with a lot of our customers especially our strategic accounts we have at at least bi-weekly if not weekly calls with them yeah and it's and you know the network engineers want that it's not that we're imposing that it's it's it has become a standard for us yeah to want to be able to conversate with them to want to be able to kind of show them our roadmap make sure that everything that we're doing aligns with what they want to do yeah and i think there's a lot of value to that right like because you know you can you can talk with people uh who have a solution right and but all they're trying to do is like sell you and upsell you and that kind of thing but when you have someone where you're like hey like work with me on this like uh like how how are you seeing other customers do this or you know that kind of thing and you actually have that conversation it sounds like you guys are like helping with ansible script or playbooks and uh and that kind of thing too so i see a lot of value in that yeah absolutely i got to get my management on board real quick i'm thinking about i'm thinking about previous uh experiences at previous employers where we had issues without a band i really really wish we had had open gear yeah definitely had some issues with outer bands just not working and it never got fixed and we don't know what's going on oh well you know without making us sign an nda what can you tell us about the future of opengear where you have uh you know coming out there there is there's a whole lot of um new features coming out no we'll be we'll be announcing um a new product line in uh at cisco live okay so just a couple months from now um assuming the episode comes out before that um otherwise this this sentence is gonna um no we're we're coming up with the new product line just just to kind of make sure that uh the entirety of of our use case is is continuing to grow as as we're refreshing a lot of our products and we're making you know both physical and and software enhancements to the new product lines that are coming out um one thing that i'm excited about is we're kind of moving towards switching um our console pin out to match kind of the industry standard so that way if you want to console into us you can just use the industry standard console port or console cable that most data center techs have in hand and be able to connect to them hang on i'm out of banding my out of band yeah my brain just exploded i heard you like out of bands yeah you're out of band you can't it's it's actually pretty common to have kind of like a primary out-of-band connection for for your data center and then you have like you know a bunch below it and um one of our customers actually has that as a um the terminology they use is out-of-band but making sure that you have a secondary path to your out-of-band so every autobahn has to have either cellular active or a console port or its console for connected to a different outer band that has cellular active so you should call that way out of band yeah so do you have like a sd-wan solution for your automation no no no um we we well yeah we actually work along with sd-wan vendors but we don't have any kind of like sd-wan ish solution ourselves uh what we find out is um sd-wan is is great for deployment and for cloud and kind of like centralizing everything but it's still a point of failure right it still can go down and the really cool thing is as as we're developing our futures we again as i mentioned we want to go beyond that console connection right we want to be there regardless of if you're connecting through an ip or through https and we can still do those to this day right we have automate we have features on our centralized manager that gives you access to the gui or cli or ssh of your network equipment um but we don't have an sd-wan yeah solution ourselves i was kind of joking i was you were talking about out-of-band before you're out of band i was like do you have like an sd-wan solution for it just to get to your eye yeah just to get to it but but i actually like that answer so yeah every time you ask me something i'm gonna like try and like find a solution for it yeah yeah and funny story of of the out of band at abandoned at a band i was actually uh right before uh us flying here i was working with one of our customers with dan and the remote tech that was working on site had very very limited time so they had uh two different open gears deployed and they had them connected through the network cable but the on-site tech only had enough time to console into one of the devices and configure it cellular and then he's like i gotta go i don't have time for this um you know we'll pick this back up on monday uh so one what ended up happening is the cellular device connected to our centralized manager and it was up and we ended up literally at abandoning the outer band by by changing the network traffic of our primary and secondary connecting them together and forwarding the traffic from the secondary connection to the primary to the uh centralized manager and we could hear the uh customer's voice on the other side like realizing wait a minute like all of this that's a while all possible it turned to poc that would have taken you know three extra days and having to wait until monday or tuesday to that same day the customer had everything running and they were like oh i'm gonna go show this to the rest of my team and i'll get back to you with their opinion on monday you know so um it's the epitome of it sells itself yeah yeah yeah i was telling dad on the right here that that's that's the really cool thing about the product is we've we've kind of become familiar with it so we don't see it as much but it's seeing the customers having those aha moments without us really having to do a lot of work um is is a fantastic things because fantastic thing because i'm i'm not necessarily a salesman but the customer or the product kind of just does the work for me right i'm just there to kind of support with the central centralized management being a big piece of the solution what's kind of the ratio you see of how people deploy that on-premises versus cloud um it's about 50-50 i would say uh it's it's the cloud is becoming a lot more bigger now the deployment-wise back then it was i would say about 80 um our center well going back or centralized manager used to be like a physical hardware right so we used to have like a physical server way back when and then we kind of just virtualized everything and customers could deploy it in their virtual box and vsphere whatever you know solution you would like and then as cloud was growing and customers were asking about it we kind of started that offering but now cloud has kind of caught 50 percent of the market over over deployment being in the cloud yeah yeah so without uh naming names i'm sure you hear a lot of stories about how your products have helped the customers what's like the craziest thing you've heard a customer tell you about you know how how open gear saved their bacon oh man it's gonna be a lot of stories i gotta i gotta give this one i gotta give this one some thought but um the the craziest one that i can think of right now was when we had uh so so the same customer that i was talking about where they have to have an out-of-band for their at-a-band and they can't do maintenance without um having an out-of-band um they actually uh were not inside a maintenance window but they had a storm hit the entire data center and kind of shut the power down to half the stuff so as soon as the storm got kind of passed and power came up 50 of the data center was just down it couldn't get into anything and luckily the open gear was still up because that wasn't affected and just the product rebooted so they were able to without having anybody on site go and you know reconfigure everything and access everything bring everything up as needed without ever having to anybody on the side so that was the craziest one it was a physical storm that actually passed through it didn't do any damage except cut the power yeah and they were able to get in and get everything up and running that's another use case i see for open gear that's not directly related to out-of-band management because they're companies that can have distributed offices locations all over the place and those locations are susceptible to power issues and if you have an open gear device that's connected via cellular and you know you can log into your centralized management and see okay that device is down it's probably a power issue or if that device is still up then maybe i have a circuit issue there's an issue with the hardware i can get into the console and figure it out so i kind of see it as kind of a canary sensor as well as being able to see what the enviro physical environment's like whether it's up or down yeah absolutely and and the really cool thing is we have you know smaller devices for branch locations bigger devices um one of the one other feature again not to kind of trend solution around these things but and another popular feature for for the brand site branch sites are uh they actually utilize us as like the treasury internet connection so you know not only you have an out-of-band solution that you can get in and fix things but should your store um you know network connection go down you can't run credit cards anymore right you don't you don't want to be out of business until somebody comes in physically you know five hours later and just reboots the switch so um the really handy thing is yeah that they have we have that offering as well as just built into the future it sounds like it doesn't cost you anything extra you can actually enable it and you can utilize that cellular path that's so you can run a connection as a handoff to your network equipment there and yeah and you can still run your credit cards and you know go to your facebook and youtube whatever any important stuff you know exactly and it builds a tunnel out of the cell tower so that you're pci compliant all that stuff right oh yeah that's awesome what's really cool is we actually um kind of act as a dhcp server at that time and we hand over the ip to the downstream router and that way the router kind of is managing that ip address and whether you want to build an ipsec tunnel to your to your mpls sites or to your final leader to your headquarter or whether you want to take the cellular tower it's all up to you we're just kind of another hop in the in the path wow so it's only out of band until you become inband yeah absolutely by any means necessary yeah all right uh rontine any questions we should have asked you that we didn't ask you no i think you guys covered it all um i'm pretty stoked to be here yeah asheville is beautiful oh man wait we lucked out we it's a little chilly uh this weekend it was like 70s before we got here uh today it's it's uh hopefully gonna get up into the 40s maybe 15 yeah but it's absolutely beautiful outside um we got this great airbnb um not sponsored sorry um and uh it's just we're on the side of a mountain and it's absolutely beautiful see i'm i'm spoiled by this i'm not it's going to be difficult to go back and and do the virtual shows oh yeah i'm having such a blast with like being able to look at you people that's so cool yeah not you andy i'm joking i just laid that up for you you guys gotta do this annually oh yeah yeah that's what we're hoping at least yeah excellent rom team this has been a lot of fun i really appreciate it and i want to say a big thank you to opengear um you guys have been huge supporters of what we've been doing here in the podcast since the beginning and of course this asheville event that we're here for would not be possible without the kind sponsorship of opengear and the support that you guys have have made and there's some really cool gifts that opengear got for us i can't wait to show everybody and when i say us i mean everybody attending the event i'm real sorry and didn't make the event but um yeah the generosity the the camaraderie the teamwork this has been such a fun experience and uh you know thank you so much for coming on the show yeah thanks ron thank you for having me absolutely excellent well thank you very much everybody we'll see you next week on another episode of the art of network engineering hey everyone this is aj if you like what you heard today then make sure you subscribe to our podcast and your favorite podcatcher smash that bell icon to get notified of all of our future episodes also follow us on twitter and instagram we are at art of net eng that's art of n-e-t-e-n-g you can also find us on the web at artofnetworkengineering.com where we post all of our show notes you can read blog articles from the co-hosts and guests and also a lot more news and info from the networking world thanks for listening you