5 bENEFITS oF pROVIDING sECURE rEMOTE aCCESS TO nETWORK it iNFRASTRUCTURE

1. Gaining visibility into power system performance: High availability of systems is now table stakes, whether teams are managing their own or customer systems. That may mean ensuring 99.9 percent or even 99.999 percent uptime.

Being able to see and control both rack PDU performance and UPS battery conditions is critical to delivering that performance, ensuring business applications and other mission-critical workloads stay up and constantly available. Geist rPDU and Liebert UPS solutions are so tightly integrated into Avocent ACS that they appear as one continuous solution. That ensures that teams can easily see both power distribution and backup power supply conditions, receive alerts, and act on them. For companies that have been using UPS devices as standalone solutions, this integration will be a boon, providing a path for alerts that have previously gone nowhere.

In addition, many data centre and IT teams have adopted UPS solutions with lithium-ion batteries for their greater environmental resilience, longer lifespans, and lower total cost of ownership. Ultra-reliable Vertiv™ Liebert® lithium-ion UPS solutions can thus provide an extra edge, when it comes to ensuring data centre and edge site uptime.

2. Enabling cellular out-of-band management: Nothing is more stressful and challenging than power failures and network outages, which take systems down and require costly, time-consuming truck rolls. These outages cost enterprises lost sales, customer interactions, and workforce productivity, while also potentially harming these companies’ brand reputation for reliability. Outages also increase managed service provider (MSP) costs, as they must deploy trucks and service professionals rapidly to sites to bring systems back online. 

Data centre and IT teams that use Avocent ACS have between eight and 48 ports to connect devices, troubleshoot IT, and power problems remotely. When corporate networks are up, they can use TCP/IP to connect directly for in-band management processes. When networks are down, however, these teams can rely on 4G LTE cellular connectivity to access systems, speeding problem resolution and restoring system uptime. That means fewer truck rolls, which can reduce costs by 10K per year per user site.2

3. Gain granular management capabilities: Serial consoles should be able to access every single power outlet and determine if they are consuming power. In addition, these management devices should be able to turn outlets on and off. 

Avocent ACS provides these capabilities, but not every console server does. For example, some other manufacturers may require that users create outlet groups that can be remotely managed. So, data centre and IT that want this level of control may want to put Avocent ACS on their purchase list.

4. Automate more processes: Some 81 percent of IT professionals expect that network and data centre management tasks will be completely automated by 2025,3 freeing teams to do more innovation work. Avocent ACS supports those goals. Avocent ACS automates its own configuration and provides out-of-the box configuration with Vertiv™ Geist™ rPDUs and Liebert® UPS  devices. Avocent ACS also uses a RESTful API to call and automatically configure third-party solutions. As a result, buyers have choice and flexibility in which vendors they source equipment from. 

The ability to optimize processes continues with Vertiv™ Liebert® UPS solutions. Liebert UPS devices provide both input and output dry contacts. While one is reserved for remote power on-off capabilities, the others can be configured for purposes such as detecting environmental and battery fault conditions. As a result, if the rack UPS battery goes into an error state, the dry contact can connect to other systems. It can then trigger automated processes, such as using a UPS bypass switch to bring another UPS unit online. Data centre and IT teams can use these capabilities to support a greater range of devices and automate more processes. As just one example, Avocent® ACS can be used to daisy-chain individual rPDUs and power-cycle one or more devices at a time. 

5. Sole-source your rack equipment and services: Need more equipment? Vertiv™ provides a wide range of IT, power, and cooling equipment to enable modern data centre and edge operations. Vertiv™ also offers modular solutions, such as power skids and data centres, to enable buyers to deploy capacity at speed. Beyond equipment, Vertiv™ LIFE™ Services offers remote monitoring and management capabilities. As a result, busy data centre and IT teams can support growing enterprise to edge networks, deploy service when and where needed, and ensure service responsiveness when challenges arise.