Datacenter managers looking to keep tabs on an ever-widening array of network devices, firewalls and operations gear will be glad to hear that a new wave of consolidated management solutions is finally coming to market.

           

By and large, individual datacenter elements have traditionally required their own management solution, a situation that contributed to greater management complexity as each tool had to be integrated into the network whole. But the latest management systems are coming out as fully integrated all-in-one packages.

 

For example, OpenGear of West Jordan, Utah, just introduced the IM4200 Infrastructure Management gateway that combines console, service processor, power control, network device and central site management into a single appliance.

 

The system was introduced earlier this week at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco.

           

“There are some excellent management solutions out there from a number of vendors,” said Bob Waldie, CEO of OpenGear, in an interview with TMCnet. “But rather than have people buy one management solution for the console and another for service processing, we integrated all of these functions into one box.”

           

The IM4200 was designed to be both scalable and flexible. Control can be maintained via in-band access using a public data or private IP network. If that network fails, it can still be accessed with an alternate broadband or dial-in PPP. Power redundancy is provided through dual-feed supplies that can be tied to individual sources.

           

Regardless of whether the system is being accessed in-band or out-of-band, it offers a range of graphical controls, such as X11, RDP and VNC for application and OS reconfiguration, as well as HTPP and HTPPS for firewalls. It also supports IPMI, Serial over LAN (SOL), as well as iLO, RSA, ALOM, DRAC and other lights-out management tools associated with BMC and service processors.

           

Many of these tools are already standard on most servers in order to provide monitoring, logging, recovery, inventory and control of hardware, as well as BIOS, OS and applications regardless of the condition of the main CPU, network or OS. Using side-band or out-of-band channels, the IM4200 BIOS can be reconfigured and the entire system rebooted remotely even if the CPU is off-line. KVM graphical control is also maintained during network outages.

           

Waldie said another design consideration was a high availability for features.

           

“The dual power supplies, in-board modems – all are standard,” he said. “Another piece that is built in is 500 MB of USB Flash memory, giving you a lot more logging and alerting capabilities.”

           

Waldie said the IM4200 aims to take advantage of consolidation and virtualization trends in the market that will likely result in the growth of smaller datacenters that serve wireless networks and data communications providers.

           

“Ours is a simple, integrated management solution that will fit well into a small datacenter,” he said. “One box has all the access, management tools, authentication, data capture and alerting functions that you need.”

           

Two versions of the IM4200 series are available now, with a starting price of $1,495. Models with additional Ethernet ports are due out in September.

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