Data center consolidation and console management - improving efficiency on multiple levels

Efficiency is a priority in many data centers. With high energy costs and rising capacity demands creating major fiscalchallenges in data centers, many IT leaders are looking at new ways to support IT functionality while spending less money. Data center consolidation is at the center of this movement. While consolidation brings data center resources into a central location instead of having them spread over multiple branch offices, many consolidation projects still depend on distributed data center functionality in the form of third-party hosting services. As a result, console management systems can play a major role in helping IT leaders maximize the value of their consolidation projects.

Understanding the value of data center consolidation
Data center resources are spread out over multiple facilities in many traditional business settings. The need for such an architecture is simple - branch offices. It is generally less expensive, and more operationally feasible, for businesses to operate a number of smaller branch offices than a single major headquarters in one area. Each facility needs its own IT setup to support operations, which usually comes in the form of a small server closet data center that is designed to fit in the office. This can work from an operational perspective, but such data centers are often incredibly inefficient when it comes to power and resource use because the office space used to host them is not designed specifically for such equipment.

By consolidating all of these smaller data centers into a single, highly virtualized facility, companies can alleviate their cost burden by turning a number of inefficient facilities into a single highly efficient data center. However, not every system consolidates easily, creating an environment in which many organizations performing such tasks will use third-party hosting services, even if they are only in place for backup and recovery. As a result, IT leaders depending on a consolidated data center have to manage a more complex core facility and any hosted data centers. Console server infrastructure can ease this management burden.

Taking full advantage of console management
Console management offers a variety of operational gains by providing IT managers with the ability tocontrol various aspects of the data center remotely. In a consolidated data center environment, this can be used to simplify many aspects of management, including processes involved with IT resources hosted in third-party facilities. However, remote management functionality can also pay dividends when something goes wrong in the consolidated data center because the complexity of such environments presents many challenges that require rapid responses.

Perle's wide range of 1 to 48 port Perle Console Servers provide data center managers and network administrators with secure remote management of any device with a serial console port. Plus, they are the only truly fault tolerant Console Servers on the market with the advanced security functionality needed to easily perform secure remote data center management and out-of-band management of IT assets from anywhere in the world.