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September 13, 2010
With the release of the U.S. federal government’s HSPD-12 directive a few years ago, many CIO’s and IT managers found themselves with a key issue to address: how to authenticate both local and remote IT personnel as they access government servers and networks. HSPD-12 mandates secure, authenticated access to all federal information systems and buildings. While smart cards were already in use in several industries worldwide, their use really exploded when the U.S. Department of Defense responded to HSPD-12 by utilizing smart card technology as the basis for implementing its Common Access Card program (CAC). More recently, the DoD introduced a new type of smart card known as a Personal Identity Verification card (PIV), which must conform to the FIPS-201 standard.
Using a smart card to access a PC or server that’s within arm’s reach is easy. However, a major challenge is to support this directive in the data center or any application in which users must access multiple servers or PCs that are often located in a separate room, let alone several feet away. It’s inefficient to connect a smart card reader to each device and insert the card each time access is needed. In fact, it’s usually not possible to do so. In many cases, users need to access servers in inaccessible rooms – and with different security levels.
To meet this need, several smart card-enabled KVM solutions have been introduced by the industry’s primary vendors. Of course, no two are exactly alike, so what do you need to look for? It’s important to choose not only a solution that fulfills the basic requirement of supporting smart card authentication to multiple servers from a single location, but also one that makes the necessary feature adjustments that meet and exceed the highly secure operation requirements inherent of a smart card environment.
September 3, 2010
2010 AFCOM Data Center World Fall Conference
Raritan Booth #609
Oct. 4-5, 2010
Mirage Hotel and Convention Center
Las Vegas, Nevada
September 3, 2010
Raritan Booth #118
September 12-15, 2010
MGM Grand Hotel & Convention Center
Las Vegas, Nevada
Allen Yang
August 26, 2010
Raritan IT team recently decided to change our naming and association schemes in Power IQ. This change reflects the new level of power usage details IT wants to track, and how we plan to utilize such information to measure energy savings from the investment in replacing old servers with new, more energy efficient IT equipment.
In the prior Power IQ naming scheme, we name the PX outlets by “phase-circuit-rack-L/R”. From this naming scheme, one can easily tell that it was PX-centric thinking. Using Power IQ, IT was able to easily know the total data center power consumption, as well as power usage by circuit and by the rack. The power consumption by individual IT devices was interesting but not as important for power capacity planning, especially when the servers were largely 1U/3U rack-mount servers.
Dorothy Ochs
August 11, 2010
Come visit the Raritan booth at DatacenterDynamics in Washington, DC on August 31st to learn about our intelligent energy management solutions. For more information and to register, visit https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/conferences/.