The Raritan Blog

Guess how much a typical data center failure can cost?

April 5, 2012

According to a recent study, the average data center downtime is 90 minutes, which results in an average cost per incident of about $505,500 - Ouch!  And, of those surveyed, 95% have experienced one or more unplanned data center outages in the past 2 years - that’s over $1 million dollars in 2 years! (The math - 1 outage/yr x $500K x 2 years = $1Million!) To make matters worse, only 1/3 of respondents felt that they had sufficient resources in order to recover from a failure! Don’t be left in the dark and experience an outage—let Raritan help you prepare with our innovative DCIM solution!

Why Deploy High Voltage to IT Equipment Racks?

Greg More
April 5, 2012

Data centers are finding that they must deploy more and more power to their racks. High-power requirements at data center racks are driven by high density such as racks filled with 1U “pizza box” servers or multiple blade server chassis in one rack. Racks of network storage devices can also drive high demand for power.

When considering power demand it is important to determine and design for peak actual demand. Designing to IT equipment nameplate ratings is excessively high. Designing for average power consumption may not be sufficient for periods of peak demand.

Many data center managers are doing a good job conserving energy – decreasing PUE, raising data center temperatures, using air-side economizers to reduce energy consumption for cooling—but average power consumption at the rack may still go up. In fact, the increased efficiency means more power is available for servers which supports data center growth.

Remote IT Infrastructure Management – Supporting Business Continuity Throughout Government Agencies

Paula Alves
March 28, 2012

For the U.S. Department of Defense and civilian agencies that rely on their IT infrastructure to protect national security and sensitive scientific data, application servers that are down can mean the loss of life or the loss of critical research. Time is of the essence when these disasters strike. Agency managers and division chiefs must quickly access, troubleshoot, diagnosis and repair the affected data center equipment.

Raritan’s Remote Management and Control Solutions provide an expanded level of secure remote access and centralized management for Government agencies and lights out data centers, even from an iPad® or iPhone®. These solutions provide FIPS-encrypted, secure BIOS-level interaction with the infrastructure and support the capability to power cycle, reboot, reinstall software, reimage servers and change BIOS options.

April 5th Phoenix DCIM Summit - Best Practices, Case Studies, and Tour

Dorothy Ochs
March 25, 2012

Get the latest trends in DCIM (Data Center Infrastructure Management), rack thermal management and best practices for data center design, build and operations.

Organization growth, data center consolidation and the need to provide more IT-based services place increasing demands on IT staff and data center resources such as electrical power, cooling capacity and space for IT equipment. To relieve these pressures data centers must become more efficient—extremely efficient. This event will present a series of real-world, end-user case studies so you will learn not only what efficiencies are possible but also how to make them a reality in your own data center.

This event will also include a tour of the IO Data Center - which is the largest commercially available data center in the United States to achieve Tier III Design Certification from the Uptime Institute.

You’ll see firsthand that not all data centers are created equal®.

Yet Another Security Issue with Remote Access Software

Richard Dominach
March 16, 2012

Recent articles in InfoWorld, “Microsoft urges firms to focus on severe RDP flaw,” and PCWorld, “Microsoft issues Urgent Patch for ‘Wormable’ RDP Vulnerability,”(1) illustrate the potential dangers of software-based remote access tools.  The vulnerability, cited as “dangerous,” “very serious” and “critical” applies to the Remote Desktop Protocol, widely used throughout the IT industry for remote access.  Other software-based systems include VNC, pcAnywhere, and many others.

Software-based remote access is widespread.  The InfoWorld article mentions that “There could be as many as 250 million systems with an open RDP port” and  “An estimated 140,000 computers running pcAnywhere could be directly contacted from the Internet.”   In my previous blog focused on the dangers of poorly configured remote access systems, I cite another article that estimates 83 million open VNC ports.

Users of remote access software should closely follow best security practices as recommended by the applicable vendor and their security organization, as well as immediately apply security patches as they are available.  Users should not be complacent about the use of these tools, and should carefully and thoughtfully consider the benefits and risks, applying the proper safeguards to harden and monitor their environments.

Users should also consider the benefits of hardware based remote access, such as KVM-over-IP switches, which provide “out-of-band” access that does not rely on “software” running on the remote server.  Out-of-band access can be more secure, provide access even when the server’s OS or network is not working, and provide a wider range of use cases including BIOS-level access and remote booting.   A higher level of manageability can be achieved through centralized permissions, authentication, and logging.   And as the KVM switch does not rely on software running on the remote servers, there is never a need to patch hundreds or thousands of servers.

With 24x7 reliability required for today’s IT infrastructure, remote access is an absolute necessity.  These recent articles illustrate the dangers of software-based approaches and the need to seriously examine your remote access users to implement a secure, productive, and manageable remote access solution.

(1) https://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/251760/microsoft_issues_urgent_patch_for_wormable_rdp_vulnerability.html

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