Onsite Manual Patching, and Why It’s Yesterday’s News with Legrand

September 3, 2024

Say you’re an IT professional, and, during a dead sleep, at 4 am, you’re woken up by a call on your work phone.  

“All our systems are crashing, and we’re not sure what’s causing it!” 

Could it be… 

a global outage caused by a software update? 
a configuration problem that’s only affecting your systems? 
an attack aimed at your digital operations? 

It’s hard to know, right away. But it’s all hands on deck to determine what the problem is. You and your peers are going to go through diagnostics, talk to your Security team, talk to your vendors, and then determine a root cause.  

Let’s say in this case, your root cause analysis identifies the problem: a misconfiguration that requires a manual patch, deployed computer-by-computer, server by server, location by location. 

If you’re running IT for a small business, the manual approach might not be a problem for you. But if you’re working in a larger organization, trying to patch hundreds or thousands of systems, manually, it’s a nightmare. Depending on the size of your organization, patching hundreds or thousands of affected systems could take days. Days you don’t have, because during that time, your business limps along, offering compromised service quality to employees and customers alike.  

Can you imagine what those delays might do to your customer satisfaction, your credibility, and your revenue? 

But what if there was a way to reduce the delay? A way to manually update each system without leaving your home office? 

There is -- the KVM over IP. Every week, our customers use Raritan’s KX III and KX IV KVMs-over-IP to streamline manual patches with direct connectivity to each system in your office or data center. Spanning hundreds of systems at a time, with a remote keyboard for safe mode booting, and support for remote boot from USB or virtual media, our KVMs are perfect for fixes to your systems whenever you need a manual intervention.  

With Raritan KVM-over-IP, you’ll have a collection of leading-edge features, including: 

• BIOS-level access, virtual media, absolute mouse synchronization, LDAP/Radius/AD authentication, AES encryption, and support for up to 8 simultaneous sessions. 
• Support for 4K video resolution (3840x2160), up to 30 frames per second, or HD resolutions at 60 frames per second. 
• The KX IV and KX III scales with Raritan’s CommandCenter management system. With it, multiple users can access multiple switches, in single or multiple locations, across the country or even the world.  
• It offers user-configurable bandwidth to operate over LAN, WAN, and even the Internet for emergency out-of-hours IT support.  
• As a flexible IP solution, it is accessible via User Station, Laptop, PC, and smartphone supporting users, managers, engineers, and IT.  
• Java-free KVM access is available on Windows, Linux, and Mac.

Since the KX III and IV provide BIOS-level connections, servers are accessible even if a server’s operating system is not working or the network interface card has failed. If the Internet is down or unavailable, our KVM switches provide a dedicated modem port. It’s also built for resilience dual power, dual Gigabit Ethernet, and automatic failover. 

To make matters even better, KVM-over-IP gives you the ability to span multiple locations or work remotely. Montana PBS uses our KX III KVM switch to manage their broadcast servers, and when there’s an emergency, their IT personnel connect to the KVM-managed servers from home, through a VPN. 

One important observation is that all of us in IT are in the business of de-risking our infrastructure. In a world where a single misconfiguration can take down hundreds of thousands of systems, Raritan’s KVMs-over-IP are a small investment for greater peace of mind, whether you’re managing eight systems, or eight hundred.  

To learn more about specifications and capabilities, click here.