Features

With departments and services spread across 64 square miles, the IT department of Norfolk, Va., supports more than 70 WAN sites that are interconnected to the organization’s three data centers. Unlike cities with a campus environment, the Norfolk decentralized operation creates added complexity for network engineers, who are challenged to provide the most reliable network possible to keep city services running effectively and efficiently.

Bob Stone, network engineer supervisor for the city, recognized that increasing the system’s reliability required updating the organization’s approach to server management. Using an analog KVM solution, however, limited access to servers and required network administrators to travel across the city from building to building to troubleshoot.

With applications being offloaded from the mainframe and minicomputers being placed onto open system servers, the number of servers in the data center amplified. Cable management was also a growing concern.

“Servers were growing dramatically in our data centers and we really needed a way to interact with them at a moment’s notice,” says Stone. “Not only did I want console access to many different servers, but I wanted the same access from my desk, home or anywhere I could connect to the Internet.”

Stone wanted to limit the physical access of engineers and developers to the data centers and thereby reduce the potential to jostle inner networking equipment, such as routers and switches. Some servers contain sensitive information, so there was also the need for a system that would provide centralized authentication, access and control.

Stone installed six Avocent DSR2010 KVM over IP switches, a 16-port system offering the flexibility of multi-user, multilocation solutions with both local and IP access for all major server platforms and serial-based devices. The Norfolk data center manages a combination of Windows and Unix-based boxes, some Linux appliances, an AS400 minicomputer and an IBM mainframe.

“The Avocent solution allows us to significantly reduce the cabling infrastructure of 70 servers and provides very fast console view of the servers over the network,” says Stone. “The DSView management and authentication software gives us the security we need to ensure that only authorized people are able to access various servers on those switches.

“Anything we can do in the data center on the servers, we can do from our workstations either in our offices in the city, at home or anywhere we have an Internet connection,” he adds. “We even provided select vendors on some mission-critical systems with DSView software. From their help desk operations in other cities, they are able to VPN into our system and use the DSView software client to take control of the server to help us with the troubleshooting process.”

The ability to perform large upgrades or system deployments, or rebooting a server several times from home while never losing connectivity, results in another benefit–more productive engineers.

“I can have two or three console windows up on a screen at a time and jump back and forth between servers as if I were right in front of them. I don’t have to get up and walk to the data center or drive to another data center,” says Stone. “The speed of issue resolution saves a significant amount of time.”

Cable reduction is another benefit of digital KVM. Bulky cables are replaced with slender CAT 5 cables that easily slide in and out of the server racks. Stone notes that the tidier solution eases the process of troubleshooting physical problems when network engineers need to access the back of racks. There is also a noticeable reduction in the amount of data center physical equipment, such as desks, chairs, monitors and keyboards.

“The Avocent solution allowed us to free up some of the physical assets and disperse them in other places,” says Stone. “The space we gained offers more room to manage the servers and saves money on everything from cooling expenses to the actual real estate.”

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