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Richard Dominach
February 21, 2011
The Dominion KSX II combo KVM/IP and secure console server has been upgraded to include all KX II Release 2.3 features, except tiering/cascading. This includes FIPS 140-2 encryption, Smart Card/CAC and other security features, making it ideal for government, military and other security conscious customers.
The KSX II supports 4 or 8 “true serial” connections for remote/branch office deployments, as well as racks requiring both KVM and serial connections. A “true serial” connection gives secure console access over IP without the use of an expensive dongle. In addition, third party SSH clients can be used in addition to Raritan’s Serial Client with features such as logging, cut and paste, and secure chat.
If you have branch offices or racks with serially and KVM controlled devices then the Dominion KSX II can give you anytime/anywhere KVM and serial remote access.
Richard Dominach
January 7, 2011
A customer recently asked how much bandwidth the Dominion KX II KVM-over-IP access uses, specifically for the full HD (1920x1080) resolution. This is a common user question. The answer is as follows.
There is no fixed bandwidth for the KX II products. The bandwidth depends on how much change there is on the video screen at a particular instant. So if there is no change on the screen, then there will be no or very small amount of bandwidth. If the user is playing a movie, then there could be a very large bandwidth. Of course with larger video resolutions, then there will be more bandwidth than with a smaller resolution.
There is a feature in the KVM clients to see the amount of bandwidth being used. This can be used to check the bandwidth. There are several settings to decrease bandwidth, as well as some helpful tips on managing bandwidth in the KX II User’s Guide called ‘Bandwidth and KVM-over-IP Performance’ that the customer may find useful.
Allen Yang
December 23, 2010
December being the month that you normally give and receive gifts, this year the welcome present we received this was the news of the virtual edition of the Command Center Secure gateway becoming GA.
For us this was long awaited news, and we were eager to replace the physical appliances we were using in the past on both the IT department, and the local Sales support demo rack.
Nothing against the physical appliance, but since we already made the jump to virtual a couple of years back (we migrated to VMware infrastructure 3.5 in 2008), and we know how much easier it is to maintain and backup a virtual appliance.)
And also the idea of getting rid of two hardware devices to reduce our power consumption, yes that was certainly appealing.
December 6, 2010
A recent article in The Datacenter Journal provides a quick overview of the new virtual CommandCenter Secure Gateway and sums up its benefits very nicely. Please check it out here.
One quick and minor correction: The evaluation version now enables access to sixteen nodes (e.g. servers, virtual machines, routers, PDU). The previous version supported access to only ten.
November 15, 2010
In Australia, the cost of electricity is rising by 10% year-on-year, an expense that can quickly translate to vast sums for large Australian enterprises. In 2009 Gartner found that energy costs would emerge as a company’s highest operating cost, second only to labour, in 70% of all data centre facilities worldwide.
With the cost of power rising dramatically and increased uncertainty about global power availability all levels of corporate management are more focused than ever on managing and conserving energy.
The saying “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” is particularly true for power, where rule-of-thumb estimates can turn out to be just plain wrong, leading to unnecessary and sometimes substantial costs. Nowhere is this more critical than in the data centre, as typically data centres use on average 25% of the total energy consumed in a typical large organization.