[Wolves] Remote Power Management

[Alastair Battrick]

Adam Sweet wrote:
> I'm looking at putting some machines (a few initially,
> possibly lots eventually) into a data centre and
> managing remotely. I can do everything over SSH except
> shut the machines down or reboot them when they're
> dead and I don't know a great deal about this kind of
> thing.

If they are going into racks, the type of rack will make a difference 
and whether it has doors on or not. APC are a big supplier in this area, 
supplying vertical (0U) 21 port panels but they would not fit into the 
enclosure that we were looking at, at the time. We currently use a 
couple of their 6 or 8 port 1U jobbies.

What I wanted was to monitor each outlet's power usage, query it via 
SNMP to produce some pretty graphs of server power usage but there is 
only 1 unit that is available to do this, 8 outlets in a 1U case for 
£420 +VAT.

> Would I want an IP KVM? Why? What do they do that I
> couldn't do remotely over SSH, or locally using a
> regular KVM (should I need to go on-site)?

If a machine will not boot, for whatever reason, and you don't have 
engineers on site, an IP KVM is really useful. You can (remotely) watch 
the boot sequence, jump into the BIOS, select a different boot loader, 
all of which cannot be done via SSH. Depending on the budget they may be 
a single port standalone affair or optionally link with a regular KVM 
unit to allow unit switching.

I found the guys here to be very knowledgeable about both power and KVM 
options:
http://www.kvmchoice.co.uk/

Al

http://www.datasnake.co.uk