Downtime happens, console management can ease recovery challenges

Data center downtime is often inevitable. Sometimes it doesn't matterhow many redundant power, network of equipment solutions you have in place, you still find yourself dealing with an outage and potential financial losses. What's more, this scenario is a real possibility whether you are managing your own internal data center or taking advantage of third-party services. As a result, you have to have systems in place that allow you to respond as quickly as possible to an outage. Console server solutions can help alleviate the burden of downtime by giving you the ability to respond quickly to outages and make configuration changes remotely.

Considering the likelihood of an outage
According to a recent Gartner blog post, the rising popularity of third-party data center services, such as cloud computing and colocation, have led many people to start thinking that a good vendor can offer uptime so close to 100 percent that an outage is almost impossible. There are some statistics to back this up. The problem is that not every outage gets publicized and it is fairly easy for a vendor to push an event under the rugs.

The report's author has been talking to IT leaders using third-party data center services for more than a decade. After hearing from then, she concluded that most organizations working with a data center service provider can anticipate approximately one outage a year. In many cases, hardware failure or a similar problem will lead to an extended outage. This does not mean that colocation, hosted private clouds or the cloud is not a viable option. Instead, it indicatesthere is a lot of variability when it comes to outages.

The news source explained that as anorganizationinvests heavily in availability and resiliency and find itself getting unlucky and having an outage a few months later. At the same time, a company with minimal redundancy in the data center can get lucky and avoid an outage for years. The reality is that most companies have to think of outages as inevitable and prepare accordingly.

Taking advantage of console management
Organizations depending on third-party data center hosting services in which they still own their own hardware, or simply managing a number of branch data centers, can benefit substantially from console management for disaster response. The remote management capabilities of console server systems enable IT leaders to adjust the configuration and minimize the impact of an outage immediately, enabling them to minimize damages.

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.