Emerging data center models make console management vital

Running an internal data center can be an extremely difficult and complicated process, especially as many businesses are working to improve operational, financial and environmental efficiency within their technical environments. This has led to rising demand for advanced management solutions that allow IT leaders to responsively handle various challenges and improve operational functionality. Console management solutions can help many organizations simplify how they run their data centers by giving them the ability to control various aspects of their facilities remotely. This is especially true as data center operational models switch away from large internal facilities and toward more efficient private data centers and greater use of hosting solutions.

Understanding how the data center is changing
A recent ZDNet report explained that the data center industry has changed a lot in just a half a century. In the 1960s, the sector was all about computer rooms with mainframes. Then the data center was born in the form we often see it today when servers gained prevalence and that system held through most of the 1990s. However, things have been changing since the new millennium dawned. For the most part, the contemporary data center looks a lot like mainframe computer rooms, just built around servers, storage arrays and network solutions. Storage is actually becoming more important in many ways. However, one of the greatest changes has been the move toward colocation and cloud computing.

Whether organizations are using a hosted private cloud, having their systems housed in a colocation facility or using some form of the public cloud, the move toward third-party services is growing, the report said. This creates an environment in which there are often two types of facilities - enormous service provider data centers that use extremely large amounts of power and present scale-related management challenges or smaller, highly consolidated and dense private data centers that businesses run on their own. Both of these data center formats present management challenges that console management can resolve.

Taking full advantage of console servers
The problem with shifting data center models is that the new ways of running IThinge on being able to either handle extremely large equipment footprints or systems that are heavily utilized. Responding quickly to problems is essential in either setting, but many data center management tasks require manual interaction with infrastructure. Console management provides remote configuration adjustment capabilities, making it much easier to keep up with challenges in the contemporary data center.

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.