The concept of out-of-band infrastructure (OOBI) has been used throughout the telecom industry for voice communication since the mid-1950s. Having a critical requirement to always provide dial-tone for health and safety reasons, the telecom industry created elaborate mechanisms which allowed quick service restoration using alternative communication pathways which were physically and logically separate from the voice traffic itself. This early concept of a distinct 'control path' is considered the foundation of out-of-band infrastructures and simply put, refers to the ability to establish distinct remedial control paths adjacent to production communications pathways. Out-of-band, indicating that the control signals are sent separately from the data, is in contrast to

in-band In telecommunications, in-band signaling is the sending of control information within the same band or channel used for data such as voice or video. This is in contrast to out-of-band signaling which is sent over a different channel, or even ov ...

signalling where the control is sent as special forms of data communications. An example of in-band signalling would be Escape sequence coding.

Computer systems management

Out-of-band management is the adaptation of OOBI for the management of computer servers and data networking hardware, typically over

Ethernet Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

and cost-effective

wide area network A wide area network (WAN) is a telecommunications network that extends over a large geographic area. Wide area networks are often established with leased telecommunication circuits. Businesses, as well as schools and government entities, us ...

References

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