Avocent Sees the Big Picture

Enterprise data centers, small-to-medium businesses and branch offices worldwide use Avocent (News - Alert) Corporation’s (www.avocent.com) digital, embedded, wireless and mobile technologies. This Huntsville, Ala.-based company offers a huge range of products, including local and remote switching devices, serial console servers, digital extension and embedded (IPMI) technologies, service processor managers, and wireless, mobile and video display solutions. Indeed, 85 percent of Fortune 1000 companies use hardware and software from Avocent.

A basic theme at Avocent is to provide IT customers with centralized management capabilities so that IT administrators can sit at a single console and control local and remote servers, network data center devices, and mobile, power and environmental appliances. Avocent’s key product in this are is DSView 3 management software that provides control of their data center and remote locations with a browser-based interface. The company’s products have It has pre-built integration compatibility with Citrix XenServer and Windows Server 2008, along with a new dynamic Power Manager module that monitors and measures energy consumption, costs and trends across the data center and remote locations.

“This is becoming important,” Avocent’s Vice President of Product Management, C.C. Fridlin (News - Alert) told me, “because many people don’t know what’s in their data centers – they don’t have a good view. We’ve found that, amazingly, 15-30 percent of devices in the data center do no work at all. Capacity issues involving power, cooling and space are also major pain points. That’s why virtualization is a good way of starting over. We can pull real-time data to give IT folks actionable information. We can manage information for our clients because our products have access to all the information. Essentially, we give clients the intelligence to manage their assets.”

That can also be seen in Avocent’s LANDesk (News - Alert) Asset Lifecycle Manager, which goes beyond the tracking of assets by creating a database that extends management of a company’s hardware and software assets through their complete lifecycle (i.e., from before procurement and past end-of-life). LANDesk Asset Lifecycle Manager can reveal the true value of a company’s IT systems, which in turn enables companies to better formulate their planning and purchasing activities.

“As you grow your data center you drive facilities and cooling costs,” says Fridlin. “The CFO wants to understand what each asset is going to be used for. It’s more than just gauging capital costs. C-level executives want a strategic plan that takes into account an asset and what its additional costs and benefits are.”

“The framework for LANDesk applications is the Avocent Management Platform [AMP], says Diane Conerly, Avocent’s training manager. “The AMP is used in two ways in Asset Lifecycle Manager: for licensing/activation and synchronization, but that’s not required. We’re working on ways to allow third parties to develop applications based on SDKs. They will also feed data in through AMP and you’ll be able to see it on the DSView console.”

Furthermore, Avocent’s MergePoint Infrastructure Explorer solution enables data center managers to assess current assets, including power and HVAC utilization and visualize changes in real-time. It can take into account new technologies such as virtualization as well as infrastructure configuration changes. The Infrastructure Explorer can also leverage the functionality of Avocent’s management software, DSview3 if it’s installed along with associated infrastructure hardware regarding access and control, power and serial device management.

Avocent has achieved a new level in terms of devising ways to perform data center planning, change management while and providinge integration with Avocent’s active infrastructure products. IT

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