Costs of unplanned outages emphasizes value of console management

Console management solutions enable IT leaders to perform key actions in the data center from a remote location. These actions range from restarting servers, reconfiguring virtual machine setups or adjusting facilities elements like temperature control. This immediate management scheme that overcomes barriers like traveling to facilities or physically moving systems around can reduce the amount of time systems go down during an outage and help organizations avoid collateral damage by separating problematic systems from the rest of the configuration during a downtime event.

Being able to perform key data center management actions remotely can prove invaluable as the costs of unexpected outages can be severe.

The costs and consequences of unexpected downtime
According to a recent Ponemon Institute study, the average outage lasts approximately 78 minutes with a cost of $7,900 per minute. A Data Center Knowledge report built around these figures explained that unplanned outages present so much fiscal damage to organizations that efforts need to made to improve maintenance and management capabilities to proactively protect against downtime events.

The news source explained that performing unplanned maintenance actions often ends up costing as much as three to nine times as much as planned maintenance. These added expenses come as workers need to put in overtime hours to meet new demands brought on by unplanned maintenance. The costs also stem from collateral damage, bringing in emergency parts and dealing with all of the data corruption and reputation damage that can come when things go wrong in the data center.

Using console management to reduce costs in an emergency
One major problem facing IT teams experiencing an emergency event is needing to get more workers on site. Many IT teams support multiple small data centers spread over hosting facilities and branch offices, making any maintenance activity an event that requires travel time. As such, organizations end up having to pay workers, sometimes at overtime rates, for the time they are spending driving out to facilities to respond to an unplanned maintenance event.

The remote management features of a console management system can alleviate this fiscal burden by making remote maintenance possible to at least control the damage if not solve the problem entirely.

At the same time, many organizations have monitoring tools that alert them when problems are on the horizon in the data center, but responding to those alerts in a timely fashion can be difficult as staff members work to get to the location and get authorization to make configuration changes. Console servers provide the remote operational capabilities to eliminate these problems and help prevent outages.

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.