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Going strictly hands-off: Managing your data centre from afar

Techniques for saving your sanity, and your job

Disaster mitigation

While it's all very well having these funky gadgets, they're only useful to you when you can actually access them from afar. And the fact is that you'll generally only use them in exceptional circumstances – when there's a problem or when you're doing something unusual such as an upgrade.

In normal day-to-day operation you'll SSH to your switches or maybe use the vendor's GUI-based management package, and you'll use RDP to connect to your servers. Serial console severs and KVM devices aren't as nice to use as SSH and particularly RDP, so you won't use them unless you have to.

Consider, then, what could go wrong and ensure you maximise your chances of being able to access your remote control devices even when something is broken.

Give consideration to putting at least the serial console server just inside the WAN or internet router so that it doesn't depend on the LAN switch being up – and while you're doing this ensure that you set its security up to mitigate the risk of having it accessible to the outside world, since it's a one-stop shop for access to your entire data centre network.

And if you're like me, go the whole nine yards and get an analogue phone line installed in the data centre and buy a console server with an internal modem. I've done entire switch stack firmware upgrades from hundreds and thousands of miles away in the knowledge that if a stack member decides not to come back up I had a modem-based serial connection into the back of it.

In short

It's often quite tricky to justify the cost of data centre management tools to people who don't really understand technology.

Ask them to sign off an IP-capable KVM server and they'll ask why you can't just use Remote Desktop, and stick a requisition for a serial console server under their noses and they'll query why you can't just manage them over the network like you used to when they were located in the office.

Practically, though, you absolutely can't live without them – and when you look at the value of the kit you manage with them, the cost is modest.

If you look hard enough you can keep costs down (if your installation is small there are vendors that do all-in-one devices that do IP KVM and serial console connectivity, for example), and if you tot up the projected cost were you to have an extended outage that you could have avoided with proper management tools the financial benefit of those tools will be immediately and clearly apparent.

Whatever you do, though, don't be persuaded that you'll hardly use these tools so you don't need them.

You'll only hardly use them because your kit hardly ever goes wrong. But when the effluent really hits the fan, proper remote management tools may well save someone's job.

Yours, probably. ®

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