Integrated Network, Console and Power Management at Raritan Data Center

Allen Yang
July 28, 2010

At Raritan’s data centers, we integrate network monitoring and management with console management and power management into a single global IT dashboard.  From the IT dashboard, IT members can see the current hot issues and track their progresses, or click into the network monitoring system to see the details of topology map and network and servers health.   What’s cool is that, with Dominion PX, the network monitor also displays environmental sensor information such as the temperature on the same screen, making it really convenient  for IT members.  The only glitch was that we initially forgot to make it clear that the temperature was reported in 1/10 Celcius units, I almost had a heart attack when I saw the temperature numbers for the first time.

The dashboard summarizes power consumption information for each data center; for details, IT administrators can then click through to access Power IQ.  This is convenient enough for now; but we are thinking to correlate the server utilization with data center power consumption in the future.  And we are waiting for the next release of Power IQ to calculate data center PUE numbers as we are now calculating that manually.

After we integrated network management with power management, we are currently integrating Raritan CC-SG and KVM into the same IT dashboard to provide the same one-click convenience of securely accessing servers and VMs through Raritan CC-SG/KVM devices. We can do this all because of Raritan’s support for open standards and popular AA services including SNMP, IPMI and Active Directory in its products.  It feels really good to see that Raritan products integrate easily with popular network management tools.