Tuesday, July 02, 2013
Console management can ease IT complexity
Max Burkhalter
If you are an IT leader in some form, chances are your day-to-day work involves trying to solve plenty of complexity problems. The contemporary data center is often a mish-mash of legacy and state-of-the-art systems that are incredibly difficult to work with, leading to a layer of complexity that is difficult to deal with. A recent study from NTT Communications found that complicated data center architectures are becoming such a problem that many IT leaders are not moving to the cloud because they are so busy dealing with current complexity.
Console management solutions could end up proving a key solution to this problem because the technology provides more flexible, adaptable and responsive control of the data center.
Looking at the complexity issue in light of the cloud
Approximately 58 percent of the IT leaders polled said that complexityin their existing data center systems is making it difficult for them to transition to the cloud. Moving forward, this issue could limit cloud adoption, even though most of the respondents said they do think the cloud represents the future of computing.Damian Skendrovic, vice president of cloud services for NTT Europe, explained that while complicated data center systems aregetting in the way of the cloud, using cloud computing plans effectively can erase some of the complexity.
"Each business has its own complexities but their CIOs need clouds which can take that complexity and hide it behind the dashboard," said Skendrovic. "CIOs expect transparency in their systems and for the control to be taken by the provider. For their part, cloud providers need to demonstrate they can virtualize and industrialize a huge variety of IT platforms and services, and deliver them all with total security."
Legacy equipment is a major contributor to the complexity that organizations are facing when trying to move to the cloud. Based on responses to the survey, the news source estimates that approximately 28 percent of the systems organizations are managing fits the label of legacy hardware.
Using console servers to overcome complexity
One major problem associated with data center complexity is the amount of time it takes to solve problems that arise. This is especially true when IT teams must travel to dispersed data center locations to manage infrastructure. Console management solutions alleviate this burden entirely by enabling remote management of data center systems, making it easier, and faster, to deal with data center issue.
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.