Blade Server Management Solution
Raritan access and remote power management technologies simplify management and control of your blade and virtual servers. So you can give each one of them the attention they deserve.
Blade servers play an important role in your data center, delivering multiple mission-critical applications within a single chassis. But since they place substantial demands on both power and cooling resources, managing blades effectively is critically important to maintaining uptime and efficiency.
Now you can power and remotely manage all of your blade servers and virtual machines from a single, unified interface.
Our blade solutions now support IBM® BladeCenter®, HP BladeSystem and Dell® PowerEdge®, as well as blades from other vendors. Which means you have the flexibility to manage all of your blade servers, rack servers and virtual machines through the world’s best KVM-over-IP switches and industry-leading intelligent rack power distribution systems.
Individual components of this solution include:
- CommandCenter® Secure Gateway (CC-SG) for unified access to blade servers and virtual environments from a single interface. Logging onto a single IP address using a standard Web browser, IT administrators can access and power control all the physical and virtual servers located anywhere in the world.
- Dominion® KX II for secure, BIOS-level access to blade servers at the rack, over IP and via modem. With automatic configuration for easy deployment, Dominion KX II can auto-discover the installed blade servers and display dynamic status.
- Dominion PX™-4000 series of intelligent rack power distribution units (PDUs) to help meet the high-power requirements of blade servers. Three-phase 60A models can deliver up to 22kVA and support temperature and humidity sensors that monitor blade server inlet temperatures. Power monitoring and alerting via outlet-level and outlet-group metering provide current, voltage, power factor, active power, apparent power and real-time kWh metering.
- Power IQ™ Data Center Energy Management Software to automate secure, time-based power control and enable powerful analytics reporting of your energy costs, temperature readings, active power, line capacities and carbon footprint. Trending reports and cumulative totals can be displayed at the data center, floor, room, rack, customer and IT device level. Power IQ manages Raritan’s Dominion PX and third-party rack PDUs, including APC®, Geist, Server Technology® and more. It is open database compliant (ODBC) and can also be integrated with your current data warehouse and enterprise reporting system.
Why focus on blade server management and control?
While deploying blade servers provides space savings, data center infrastructure managers continue to discover that blade servers create complexities of their own:
- Remote server administration becomes more difficult by adding another vendor’s proprietary technology and management system to the already complex server mix.
- Local blade access is cumbersome and insecure.
- Security is compromised due to a lack of centralized user authentication, authorization and audit logs when using multiple access methods.
By consolidating physical and LAN connections, Raritan’s blade server solution provides a single, reliable, secure method for accessing data center elements.
A turnkey digital KVM appliance, Dominion KX II provides at-the-rack access to blade servers in the data center, as well as remote TCP/IP or dial-up modem access. And our CommandCenter Secure Gateway (CC-SG) management system incorporates and expands the power of the Raritan solution even further. From a single interface, users can access blade servers, rack servers as well as virtual servers in the same data center, or from multiple data centers in geographically dispersed locations. Dominion KX II seamlessly integrates with CC-SG to provide KVM over IP as well as access to management modules across many cabinets and across many locations.
Power and cooling – the other half of the blade server equation.
Blade servers also consume significant amounts of power. This means careful planning must be done in order to supply blade servers with the power they need to run, while closely monitoring the heat they generate.
Raritan’s Dominion PX rack PDUs can indicate the load on each of the three lines of a three-phase system. With Dominion PX, it’s easy to confirm that the power draw is balanced or to rearrange the load if it’s not.
Plus Power IQ, our energy management software, gathers power information from PX and third-party rack PDU’s – such as APC, Geist, Server Technology and others – to consolidate power information across several blade servers and report that information by location, equipment type or department. This information can be used to better manage the data center, such as comparing blade server efficiencies or reporting carbon footprints by end-user department.
