SPECIAL FOCUS: TESTING & MONITORING
Are you in control?
by Bill Talbot
Managing remote locations presents a number of unique challenges. For starters, IT departments usually have to do more with less at remote locations–where technical resources are often scarce. Secondly, remote users frequently experience poor application and network performance due to WAN performance constraints.
IT staff is often unable to accurately measure end-user performance and cost-effectively resolve issues because they lack the tools that can autonomously find and fix remote problems. During network outages and disruptions, the centralized IT staff faces reduced visibility, control and security at remote sites because the monitoring and management tools they rely on are themselves dependent on the network being up and functional. As a result, managing remote locations has become increasingly complex.
A critical solutions gap exists between current technologies and the management needs of today’s highly distributed enterprises. Neither in-band nor out-of-band tools are able to reliably diagnose and fix problems at remote locations, forcing IT staff to go onsite for routine administration and recovery tasks.
Most in-band network-management systems were designed to work with LAN systems instead of the WANs that are becoming pervasive in enterprises today. These LAN environments had relatively few performance problems due to their high bandwidth and limited points of failure. The LANs were also easier to maintain when problems did arise, since fixing a remote device meant, at most, traveling across campus to do so.
The majority of these tools rely on a network protocol, such as simple network management protocol, to both collect and report system data, which makes them dependent on the very area they are supposed to manage–the network. During network outages or disruptions, these network-based tools cease to function.
Out-of-band technologies such as keyboard/video/mouse (KVM) and console servers provide an alternative path to access remote devices, overcoming the network dependency issue of in-band tools. They lack the intelligence and automation capabilities to identify and resolve problems, however, leaving a network administrator’s best guess to fix critical issues manually. An alternative management approach deploys solutions where they are needed most–at the edge of the network.
A key requirement of a remote-management solution is to provide constant connectivity and access to the devices that need to be managed. This can be accomplished by deploying management technologies that utilize the most reliable and most secure management channel available–the console connection. By using a solution that connects directly to managed devices, IT staff can maintain constant access and control over distributed locations, overcoming the network-dependent limitation of existing in-band management.
By taking this architectural approach, a console-connected remote-management solution enables IT staff to constantly enforce security management policies that cannot be provided with network-dependent tools or traditional remote-access tools, such as modems or console servers. These policies include maintaining and enforcing authentication, authorization and accounting standards even when the primary network connection is unavailable; preventing unauthorized user access by automatically managing user sessions and providing granular, role-based permissions; and delivering the reporting data needed to meet stringent security and compliance requirements by logging all changes made to managed devices, and the results of those changes, even during network outages.
A remote-management solution should also serve as a virtual IT administrator by reliably and consistently providing a suite of management functions locally, such as the automation of routine system monitoring, maintenance, configuration and recovery tasks. The end result is the elimination of costly “truck rolls” to fix common problems like restoring unresponsive devices, or performing routine system maintenance, such as OS upgrades or configuration changes.
Bill Talbot is marketing director for Uplogix, Austin, Texas.
For more information
(click here)