Emerging technologies putting more pressure on data centers

Virtualization, despite its influence, has probably left you shaking your head at least once or twice wondering what monster you created when you told business leaders that virtualization would be a good idea. At its core, virtualization is an excellent idea that is completely transformative in the data center. While the technology is ushering in a new era of high-performance, flexible and adaptable data center functions, it's also leaving IT managers with so many major architectural problems that they are left scrambling to keep up. In a sense, virtualization is a hydra.

Understanding the monster-like side of virtualization
The problem with virtualization is that it is not a single-headed beast. Virtualization laid the foundation for the cloud. Thishas enabled more widespread mobile device use, which has led to the consumerization of IT, which has contributed to more third-party IT service use andhas enabled companies to consolidate their data centers. All of this has left IT managers applying virtualization to the legacy and mission-critical hardware that is still being used. The end result is an incredibly difficult facility to manage.

On one hand, you have to provide governance, oversight and strategic direction for all of the consumer tools, cloud services and third-party solutions the company is using. On the other, you are tasked with taking legacy and critical systems and configuring them in a way that creates cloud-like functionality in the corporate data center. Once you solve one problem another couple of issues come up and, in the end, many IT managers find themselves struggling to keep up because their is so much to do.

Slaying the virtualization monster
Simplicity is central to dealing with the new challenges that have been unleashed through virtualization and the technologiesthat have emerged because of virtual architectures. Unless a company has the funds to build a sophisticated, state-of-the-art data center that takes advantage of a variety of contemporary power and cooling solutions, IT managers are left needing to piece together a variety of systems to improve data center efficiency. The key, when deciding which strategies to use, is to avoid creating so much complexity that managing the data center efficiency solutions because as difficult as dealing with the actual IT systems.

One simple, but effective, option is console management. Deploying console servers gives IT managers the ability to make vital configuration changes and updates from a remote location, allowing them to respond to problems more easily and manage the data center more effectively. This is accomplished without an overly-complex service architecture, providing significant results with minimal disruption.

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.