Out-of-Band Management Featured Article
February 08, 2013Equipment Updates and Live Footage Even During a Flood
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As ex-cyclone Oswald approached the South-East corner of Queensland, it was a bit of déjà vu for Brendan Baker and the Opengear (News - Alert) team. Opengear, a solution provider for advanced console management, serial console access, network hosts, PDU and UPS management, among other solutions, is based in Queensland, Australian.
Brisbane and surrounding areas suffered its worst flooding event in over 100 years back in 2011. Many thousands of homes and businesses were affected by the flooding, and the whole region ground to a halt during the natural disaster and its recovery.
“So when alarms bells started to ring that we may be in for something similar yet again, it became a nervous wait,” wrote Baker, the national sales and business development manager for Opengear, in a recent blog post.
The rains lasted four days this time around, and there was both damage and power cuts across the Queensland coast. Power and communication was impacted statewide.
“The interruptions to power and comms really highlighted how reliant we are on our Internet connections and digital media for our information – and how lost we can feel without them,” he noted.
“It certainly wasn’t the weekend to be out on the roads, so we feel for those guys out there responding to service calls, whether it be for downed power lines, or to reestablish network connections.”
That got Baker thinking about one of Opengear’s clients.
After the flooding in 2011, one of Opengear’s customers installed a bunch of their cellular-enabled ACM5004-G units along a stretch of highway in cabinets. The cabinets contained critical communications equipment for highway message displays.
How were the cabinets and their precious cargo holding up to the flooding this time around?
“During the 2011 floods, the whole area was an inland sea,” Baker noted in his blog post, so he feared the worst as the area again became a waterlogged mess.
Happily, this time the flooding was not as damaging.
“The cabinets weren’t adversely affected this time round,” he wrote.
It was comforting to know that Opengear’s customer could gain access to their sites to check the status of the equipment, however, “and even see live footage of the surrounding area with IP cameras, all over the 3G network,” he wrote.
“A few less cars on the road, and a few extra people out of harms way.”
Edited by Rich Steeves
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