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Patient Profile:
An IT Infrastructure that includes Raritan’s KVM and Access products for support of BIOS-level remote access and control of physical and virtual servers, intelligent PDUs, and serial devices. This may include Dominion® KXII KVM-over-IP Switches, Dominion SX Secure Console Servers, Dominion KSX KVM-over-IP and Serial Access Appliances, or Raritan’s CommandCenter® Secure Gateway.
Symptoms:
Not keeping up with version updates? Out of warranty products? Not making the most use of your Raritan KVM investment?
Diagnosis:
Your critical business resources are at risk of not being there when you need them the most.
Prescription:
Raritan’s Healthcheck – an assessment of your current deployment and how you can get the most of your remote access and control.
Take advantage of our one day “HealthCheck” Service 50% off for qualified customers.*
Click here for more information.
*Valid now to September 30, 2012. Subject to approval by Raritan Inc. Offer available in U.S. and Canada only.
Join Raritan at the Uptime Institute Symposium in the Santa Clara Convention Center, May 14-15, 2012. Raritan will be discussing some of the anomalies and issues when metering current in three-phase power deployments. We will also present approaches to monitoring power consumption and practical, tactical methods to increase efficiencies.
Presentation - Tuesday, May 15, 2012, 2:40-3:10pm, Ballroom F
Raritan Booth# 221
Join us at the Forum on Financing, Investing & Real Estate Development for Data Centers. Use code sp20 to get a 20% discount when registering.
REGISTER AT
http://www.imn.org/Conference/Financing-Investing–Real-Estate-Development-for-Data-Centers/Home.html
Stop by our booth or come to our panel discussion. We will look at energy efficiency by market and answer the following questions:
- How much does green cost?
- How much are your customers willing to pay for it?
- Selling surplus power back to governments: Is it working out as the governments said it would?
- Alternative sources of power: When are they practical for the data
center?
Date: Wednesday, May 23, 2012, 12:25am
Title: Green Data Centers, Data Center Energy Efficiency and ROI/Payback
Room: Track A
Speaker: Jon Inaba, Director of Power Management Solutions
In the course of my consulting engagements with many enterprise clients, over the past few years I have personally configured thousands and thousands of intelligent power strips for network deployment. Since “site services technician” is not part of my job description, you might wonder if perhaps I just have too much free time.
Quite the contrary. Instead, Raritan created a means to configure intelligent power strips (set IP address, change time settings, set unique name, turn on SNMP, etc.) — in real-world environments — very rapidly and very easily. With minimal effort, a single person can configure hundreds of power strips in a single afternoon. The technique is unique and is likely surprising to most clients, so I’d like to take the time in this post to explain its methodology and rationale.
Many of our clients deploy significant quantities of intelligent power strips, in order to enable better energy management and capacity planning. Thus, Raritan is uniquely motivated to help deploy them quickly, because the value of the data provided by intelligent power strips can only be appreciated when the power strips are network-reachable. It pains me to visit facilities that have purchased networked power strips (of any brand), where the data center operators have not actually deployed their connectivity features due to reluctance to expend the tedious effort required to network them. These facilities are missing the tremendous business and operational value that metered rack power strips deliver.
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As IT and telecom infrastructures have become increasingly more dynamic and power densities continue to rise, traditional cooling in a raised floor environment has become increasingly difficult to apply efficiently. Join infrastructure management specialists AdaptivCOOL and Raritan in this informative webinar on how to manage data center Power & Cooling resources.
This free informative webinar will give you tips on:
-The importance of knowing your data center’s capacity
-What tools to use in order to gain visibility into your data center’s capabilities
-What cooling & power management means to your data center
-How managing cooling & power can transform your data center
Register at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/567725360
Over the past fifteen years or so the Federal government has nearly quadrupled the number of data centers it operates. These centers have been using less than half of their compute power despite the additional costs for infrastructure, real estate and energy which have rapidly become more expensive and unsustainable.
The Federal Data Center Consolidation’s goal is to shut down data centers the government does not need and consolidate and optimize the ones that remain to be more efficient by reducing the overall energy and real estate footprint of government data centers. This initiative also includes increasing the IT security in these data centers given the almost daily reports of cyber-attacks we hear about, let alone the ones we don’t.
Federal CIOs were required to submit final their Data Center Consolidation Plans in 2011. Each agency’s consolidation approach, rationale and timeline were established. Almost every agency has many departments under it and each of these departments has their own IT assets. With this in mind, how does a specific department within an agency track its assets, track power consumption and accurately make additions, moves and deletions to their infrastructure given that now they are in a very large data center with many other departments under the same agency?
A solid Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) tool is the answer. These tools can track all the data on each data center device or item. This data includes power consumption at the branch circuit, rack or PDU level as well as information on when the equipment was purchased, what version of firmware it’s running, when the warranty expires and, most importantly, what rack it’s in and if it’s really there.
DCIM is an excellent tool given the number of contractors that tend to come and go during the course of a data center support contract. DCIM can also serve as a terrific source of “knowledge transfer” for when a change of management occurs or a new contractor comes on board, so the new team knows what they are inheriting in the data center.
Over the past few years, economic uncertainty and the subsequent impact on businesses have led many IT organizations down a cost reduction path. to virtualization of their IT infrastructure, and movement to the “cloud.” In fact, according to Gartner, in Cloud Computing: Economic, Financial and Service Impact on IT Planning Assumptions, “cloud” adoption is forecasted to grow from 3.5% of the IT marketplace to 5.9% in 2015.
To ensure the IT infrastructure remains available, before an organization jumps on the “cloud” bandwagon, it is important to identify the tools that will be needed to control, manage and secure this new “cloud-based” architecture. With application virtualization and additional access options such as mobile smartphones and tablets – not always owned by the business – how do you ensure secure access to your network? The costs to rip and replace existing infrastructures can be exorbitant.
Raritan’s Cloud Management Solution centralizes management and provides out-of-band remote access of critical IT resources from anywhere. Combined with tight security, power and environmental control, Raritan’s solution operates in private and in hybrid clouds and provides IT administrators with the tools necessary to visualize assets, troubleshoot issues, restore operations and ensure availability…anytime and anywhere. And for those businesses that are considering a public cloud, Raritan’s Cloud Management Solution gives cloud providers management capabilities across their network infrastructure
For more information on how Raritan’s Cloud Management Solution can help your virtualization plans, contact your authorized Raritan representative or see our website at: http://www.raritan.com/resources/application-briefs/cloud-Infrastructure-remote-management-solution-application-brief.pdf.
I have been following the RDP vulnerability mentioned in my previous post:
http://blog.raritan.com/2012/03/yet-another-security-issue-with-remote-access-software/
Found a good article on f-secure.com with advice on how to protect your environment.
Also makes the point that SMB’s may not be aware that contractors enable RDP to help maintain their IT environment.
According to a recent study, the average data center downtime is 90 minutes, which results in an average cost per incident of about $505,500 – Ouch! And, of those surveyed, 95% have experienced one or more unplanned data center outages in the past 2 years – that’s over $1 million dollars in 2 years! (The math – 1 outage/yr x $500K x 2 years = $1Million!) To make matters worse, only 1/3 of respondents felt that they had sufficient resources in order to recover from a failure! Don’t be left in the dark and experience an outage — let Raritan help you prepare with our innovative DCIM solution!
