Distributed data center models making console management essential

The enterprise data center industry is stretching itself in two. On one side of the extreme, the trend toward consolidation is rapidly gaining prominence. On the other, the rising move toward third-party hosting services, such as colocation, are leading to an even more distributed architecture than normal. Console management can play a key role in this often-conflicting environment.

Taking a close look at corporate data centers
For a while, the data center was a fairly simple place. Businesses would rent out some data center room in their office space, set up some servers, storage arrays and network equipment, and they could sit back and let everything run with just a little oversight from IT. If the company opened a new branch it would just put a server closet in that office and sustain operations there. But then something not entirely unexpected happened - data requirements climbed and many organizations found themselves needing bigger data centers. As a result, those small branch-office facilities seemed woefully inefficient. Consolidation became the answer to this problem. Installing some WAN infrastructure to connect office LANs and moving all the data center systems into a central data center.

At the same time, distance matters in the data center. When data has to travel an extended distance latency becomes a problem. Sometimes, organizations need a data center near an office to support application performance standards. In other cases, a business may just find that while consolidation has been great, it still has some services it wants to support and those apps don't fit well in the consolidated data center. Many data center consolidation plans are accompanied with a move to colocation or cloud computing to support the broad plan. While some cloud and colocation services are managed by the vendor, many private cloud and most colocation options depend on companies managing their own hardware, or at least the resources they are renting.

As organizations have to deal with consolidated and distributed data center setups, they need ways to quickly deal with any problems or configuration changes that need to be made in any facility. Console server infrastructure can make this possible. A console server setup enables remote management of data center infrastructure, providing full control of the entire setup when configured accordingly. This can prove incredibly useful as IT managers work to adjust to changing data center methodologies.

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.