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‘Out – of – band’ as a term in the IT management industry

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Hi – I’m new to posting, and the industry. I’m doing some research for the company I work with, as I was recently given the task to market a product that I don’t fully understand. As all the QA and Project managers on our team speak a foreign language (Hebrew), so I wanted to give it a try and ask here.

Some background – the product itself is a remote kvm access management system. It’s meant to be “the ultimate tool for IT managers”. It’s got some neat features that my marketing team swears is the next big thing in IT. I’m still confused about the “out of band” part. If it’s over ip, isn’t that obvious that it’s out of band? They insist on using this term and with some priliminary research, I’m not sure it’s the right way for us to go. Why would I say it’s ‘out of band’ and over ip in the same description?

Is there any need to state “out of band” when it’s clear already?

Any thoughts?

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In reply to ‘Out – of – band’ as a term in the IT management industry

Clarifications

I’ve never understood any reference to Out-Of-Band

In reply to ‘Out – of – band’ as a term in the IT management industry

when applied to the it products where I have seen it used.

Out-Of-Band signaling was a common term in Telephony. It is meant to distinguish a communication link where the control signalling is NOT sent over the voice/talk path of the circuit.

In-Band signaling defines a method where the signalling IS sent over the voice circuit.

Old Long Distance hacks use to work because the phone network sent tones over the voice path to control the circuit setup. A hack typically introduced tone into the tlak path. “This is a test call, do not ticket. (record LD charges).

ISDN bri and pri are OOB circuits because the control is sent over the control channel and not over the voice channels. This helps prevent hacks as the caller does not have access to the control circuit.

If they cannnot explain how the product is Out-Of-Band, then it probably isn’t.

Only ever used the term in aircraft communications …

In reply to ‘Out – of – band’ as a term in the IT management industry

When, due to either atmospheric conditions or sheer volume of radio comms in a given area, you can ‘shift’ the control frequency by a measured step thereby forming a momentary ‘slip’, as in Upper-Sideband-Slip / Lower-Sideband-Slip ~ being out-of-band.

But Wikipedia has more to say on the matter:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-band

I suppose it [i]could[/i] appear sometimes in IT terminology but I’ve never come across it.

It’s a common term in networking

In reply to ‘Out – of – band’ as a term in the IT management industry

“Out of band” (OOB) is used to designate a different circuit or technology to reach a device. For example, an OOB modem using a PSTN line is connected to the console port of a router. That way if the router can not be remotely accessed by the normal circuits, a person could dial in through the modem and access the router that way.

In your case, I suspect that OOB means that the KVM is not using the normal “In Band” method to achieve the wanted results but by accessing through Ethernet connections. Which by the way is a pretty common way of doing it.

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