The Challenge

Managing a number of branch office locations across the country or internationally, where each remote office has a small installed base of routers, servers, switches and firewalls is often a challenge for IT staff. This network of remote offices may be managed by a small group of IT professionals from the head office, often having to rely on local staff who do not have any IT expertise to carry out routine maintenance procedures such as a server reboot.

For major faults, engineering personnel have to be despatched to site to resolve problems.  This will inevitably involve costly time and travel expense, especially if the site is overseas, and may result in long outages. Moreover, remote routers and other IT equipment will sometimes require firmware upgrades and bug fixes, a formidable task if this is necessary across multiple remote sites.

Relying on software based network management tools, which only work when the enterprise network is running, is not sufficient. These may be an inexpensive solution, but infrastructure problems such as hardware, network infrastructure, or operational system failure, disrupt the normal access to your equipment via an Ethernet connection, so these software tools are rendered useless as a result. 

The Solution

Any solution to address these challenges would have to fulfill several objectives:

• Support remote console access to serial ports on any remote network device (router, server, switch, DSLAM, PBX etc.) with a serial (console) port, so that they can be managed remotely. Console port access allows easy re-configuring, rebooting, re-loading or upgrading of firmware at the BIOS level.

• Allow an emergency remote reboot of a locked up device; server, router, firewall etc after an outage or failure to restore a backed-up configuration.

• Give redundant power to any single power supply device so that the equipment is never compromised in the event of a power failure.

• Notify IT staff if the rack temperature in a remote location went above a safe limit.

• Support both in-band across the network access and out-of-band access using 4G or dial up modem capabilities.

• Monitor the power of all your attached equipment to better understand your power usage at each remote location.

• Take up as little rack space as possible in locations where space is already limited

The Result

The CPM Console Server + Switched PDU Hybrid is an innovative network management solution which provides network administrators with five invaluable tools in one compact 1U rack-mountable unit. Designed specifically for remote site locations with small IT installations where there is little or no dedicated on-site IT staff, the CPM will help you resolve networking issues quickly from a central office. Combine console access, remote power reboot, automatic transfer switching, temperature monitoring and power reporting and do away with the need to purchase separate products for each function.