Symptoms:
Not keeping up with version updates? Out of warranty products?  Not making the most use of your Raritan KVM investment?

Diagnosis:
Your critical business resources are at risk of not being there when you need them the most.

Prescription:
Raritan’s Healthcheck – an assessment of your current deployment and how you can get the most of your remote access and control.

Take advantage of our one day “HealthCheck” Service 50% off for qualified customers.*

Click here for more information.

*Valid now to September 30, 2012. Subject to approval by Raritan Inc.  Offer available in U.S. and Canada only.

Presentation - Tuesday, May 15, 2012, 2:40-3:10pm, Ballroom F
Raritan Booth# 221

REGISTER AT

http://www.imn.org/Conference/Financing-Investing–Real-Estate-Development-for-Data-Centers/Home.html

Stop by our booth or come to our panel discussion. We will look at energy efficiency by market and answer the following questions:

- How much does green cost?
- How much are your customers willing to pay for it?
- Selling surplus power back to governments: Is it working out as the governments said it would?
- Alternative sources of power: When are they practical for the data
center?

Date: Wednesday, May 23, 2012, 12:25am
Title: Green Data Centers, Data Center Energy Efficiency and ROI/Payback
Room: Track A
Speaker: Jon Inaba, Director of Power Management Solutions

- Reduce energy use and comply with Executive Order 13514
- Easily manage agency consolidation plans by tracking all of the assets in your data centers
- Provide you with secure remote access to server management

EVENT DETAILS
- What: Joint Warfighting Conference
- When: May 15-17, 2012
- Where: Virginia Beach Convention Center

REGISTER AT http://www.afcea.org/events/jwc/12/intro.asp

Quite the contrary. Instead, Raritan created a means to configure intelligent power strips (set IP address, change time settings, set unique name, turn on SNMP, etc.) — in real-world environments — very rapidly and very easily. With minimal effort, a single person can configure hundreds of power strips in a single afternoon. The technique is unique and is likely surprising to most clients, so I’d like to take the time in this post to explain its methodology and rationale.

Many of our clients deploy significant quantities of intelligent power strips, in order to enable better energy management and capacity planning. Thus, Raritan is uniquely motivated to help deploy them quickly, because the value of the data provided by intelligent power strips can only be appreciated when the power strips are network-reachable. It pains me to visit facilities that have purchased networked power strips (of any brand), where the data center operators have not actually deployed their connectivity features due to reluctance to expend the tedious effort required to network them. These facilities are missing the tremendous business and operational value that metered rack power strips deliver.

 

THE USUAL WAY : Configure Devices with Laptop

An intelligent power strip is just like any other network appliance. And most network appliances are initially configured one of two ways:

• Connect Laptop to Device via Serial (Console) Cable + Configure via Command-Line. Basically every Cisco switch on earth is configured this way. And of course, power strips can be configured this way.
• Connect Laptop to Device via Network Cable + Configure via Web Page. If you’ve ever purchased a home WiFi router, this is how you set it up. And again, power strips can be configured this way, as well.

This methodology works fine for a handful of power strips. It is very straightforward and easy to do. But for any material number of power strips (even as few as 20), it is quickly becomes mind-numbingly boring (and time-consuming) because the process is “one-to-one”. Furthermore, connecting a laptop to each power strip is not at all viable as the quantity of power strips exceeds more than a few dozen: it is simply too slow (at scale).

THE PERCEIVED “SMART” WAY: DHCP plus Auto-detection / Auto-Configuration

If you tell an Engineer or IT/Network Administrator, “I have 100 network devices [power strips] that I’d like to configure and deploy,” she will likely say the following:

1. Turn on all the devices;
2. Use DHCP to assign IP addresses to each device;
3. Run a script [or use management software] to perform mass configuration;

Indeed, in PRINCIPLE, this is the smart way. It scales. It is automated. In fact, Raritan’s own power strips come configured for DHCP out-of-the-box for this very scenario (our PowerIQ management software automatically detects the DHCP-addressed power strips and can bulk-configure them). Virtually all IT appliances of scale (such as HP iLO cards) assume this basic methodology for mass deployment.

But in PRACTICE, this “automated” process is actually prone to significant execution problems in real data center deployments. This is particularly true for new build-outs (when power strips are most likely to be installed); and is difficult to understand unless you have personally participated in the build-out / commissioning stage of a data center before. Indeed:

When new data centers are commissioned, rack power distribution is required FAR earlier than when the out-of-band network infrastructure is reliable.

Therefore, the “smart way” / “automated” way actually takes far longer to execute in real-life situations because it makes the deployment technician reliant upon the network (and network technician).

Specifically, a DHCP + automation script / management appliance methodology requires all of the following pre-conditions:

1. DHCP servers must be deployed.
2. Power strip subnets / VLANs must be deployed, and ROUTED.
3. Every Ethernet patch cable must be in place, and must work!
4. Every Ethernet port (on the out-of-band network switch) must be provisioned.

For typical IT mass deployments, the above prerequisites are not a problem at all: the network infrastructure will very typically already be deployed before the IT equipment is needed.

But for power equipment, this is simply not true. At BEST, the network infrastructure will be brand-new (and will therefore have a few routing or configuration problems). But more TYPICALLY, the rack power strips are required so early in the data center build, that one cannot in any way assume that the network is deployed fully — or that even the network engineer is onsite!

Therefore, in practical experience, when ANY of the above four conditions are not met — it requires a minimum of a few hours to fix… if not a few days.

In the same few hours that it takes to call the network engineer, ask that a routing problem be solved (or a network port be provisioned, or a bad patch cable be replaced, or DHCP to be turned on in one of the subnets), and wait for the change order to be implemented — you could have already finished configuring all the power strips! If only there was a way…

THE BEST / FASTEST WAY – Power Strip Configures Itself

Having considered (and experienced) all of the above before, Raritan implemented a mechanism in our intelligent rack power strips whereby large amounts of power strips can be configured for the network — extremely rapidly, and without dependence on the network infrastructure.

In short, this diagram explains it all (click to enlarge):

All Raritan power strips whose part number begins with the prefix “PX2″ (not just plain “PX”) will react to a correctly-formatted USB flash drive by:

• Verifying the USB flash drive carries appropriate administrative privileges;
• Reconfiguring itself with global settings found on the USB flash drive;
• Applying individual settings found on the USB flash drive [unique IP address, unique name, etc.] by referencing its own serial number on a user-supplied list;

This entire process takes place in about 20 seconds. It is, as Steve Jobs would say, “like magic”.

In a typical data center configuration, simply purchase as many USB flash drives as you have power strips in a row of cabinets. (Better yet, go to a local trade show and collect one USB flash drive at each vendor booth!) Copy the desired settings onto your USB flash drives, and insert them into every powerstrip in a row. By the time you return to the first cabinet, it will already be done configuring itself — and you can simply remove them all and move on to the next row.

Using such a methodology, I can tell you from firsthand experience that 500 power strips can be completely configured (including unique settings on each power strip) for access over the network in about two hours. I literally did this last week.

It would actually take longer to solve a single network anomaly (as required in the “smart” method) — than to completely finish a data center of 500 power strips utilizing this more straightforward approach. And rest assured, in any new data center deployment, at least one network anomaly will exist. Thus, in the very BEST case (if no network issues require troubleshooting in a newly deployed datacenter, which has never happened before in history), this method is no SLOWER than the “smart” way — for 99.9% of data centers on Earth. In most cases, it will be days and days FASTER.

TECHNICAL DETAILS FOR NERDS

The previous diagram is meant to be illustrative, not literal. For those interested in the precise method and syntax of this capability, please read on (or call your Raritan support representative).

Because I assume only nerds will read the rest of this post, complete sentences end here.

 
Files Found on the USB Flash Drive — all are plain text

• fwupdate.cfg – the first file that the power strip references. It MUST be named fwupdate.cfg (the rest of the names below are suggestions per the example syntax). This tells the power strip what to do.
• config.txt – list of COMMON settings to place on every power strip.
• devicelist.csv – comma-separated list of all power strips, by serial number, indicating the UNIQUE settings to place on each power strip.
• log.txt – file where the power strip will indicate errors (if they occur).

IMPORTANT NOTE: IF YOU ATTEMPT TO USE ANY OF THE BELOW EXAMPLES, DELETE ALL ANNOTATIONS FIRST. THEY ARE NOT PART OF THE SYNTAX.

 
fwupdate.cfg – example syntax with annotations.

// I know the administrative username + password of the power strip
// So you can trust me and do whatever this USB flash drive says to do
user=admin
password=raritan

// If anything goes wrong in this process, please indicate in a log file.
logfile=log.txt

// In the list of individual power strips, look for your own serial
// number in the 1st column... that is how you know what unique settings to apply
match=serial:1

 
config.txt – example syntax with annotations.

// Give each power strip a unique name.
// These names can be found on the 2nd column of the separate device list file.
pdu.name=${2}

// Don't force users to change their passwords every 30 days
security.pw_aging.enabled=0

Please note that there also exists syntax to change the admin username’s password from the factory default (admin/raritan) to a password of your choosing. Please contact Raritan technical support for details — and any other syntax. Also, keep in mind that once your power strips come online, making any other mass configuration change is extremely simple (particularly with Raritan’s PowerIQ management appliance).

 
devicelist.csv – example syntax, human-readable

SN,Name,StaticIPAddr,SubnetGateway,
PBE1950682,Rack12-PDU-Aside,192.168.50.120,192.168.50.1,
PBE1950241,Rack12-PDU-Bside,192.168.50.121,192.168.50.1,
PBE1950559,Rack13-PDU-Aside,192.168.50.122,192.168.50.1,
PBE1950385,Rack13-PDU-Bside,192.168.50.123,192.168.50.1,
PBE1950558,Rack14-PDU-Aside,192.168.50.124,192.168.50.1,
PBE1950701,Rack14-PDU-Bside,192.168.51.100,192.168.51.1,
PBE1950168,Rack15-PDU-Aside,192.168.51.101,192.168.51.1,
PBE1950541,Rack15-PDU-Bside,192.168.51.102,192.168.51.1,
PBE1950451,Rack16-PDU-Aside,192.168.51.103,192.168.51.1,
PBE1950117,Rack16-PDU-Bside,192.168.51.104,192.168.51.1,


Obviously, these lists are not generated by hand. Instead, use a barcode scanner to scan in serial numbers by rack, and then use Excel macros to generate the other entries according to your needs.

STANDARD DISCLAIMER / OTHER ADVICE

The above is not meant as technical documentation; please review the PX2 product documentation for further details, and contact your local Raritan support representative for assistance.

For any material deployment of Raritan intelligent power strips, your local support representative will be happy to work with you — and simply provide you with a config.txt and fwupdate.cfg file that you can use. That is to say, we’ll do the hard work for you because it’s not actually hard! Just give us a call.

Thanks for reading this extremely long post; I hope you found it helpful.

This free informative webinar will give you tips on:
-The importance of knowing your data center’s capacity
-What tools to use in order to gain visibility into your data center’s capabilities
-What cooling & power management means to your data center
-How managing cooling & power can transform your data center

Register at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/567725360

The Federal Data Center Consolidation’s goal is to shut down data centers the government does not need and consolidate and optimize the ones that remain to be more efficient by reducing the overall energy and real estate footprint of government data centers. This initiative also includes increasing the IT security in these data centers given the almost daily reports of cyber-attacks we hear about, let alone the ones we don’t.

Federal CIOs were required to submit final their Data Center Consolidation Plans in 2011. Each agency’s consolidation approach, rationale and timeline were established. Almost every agency has many departments under it and each of these departments has their own IT assets. With this in mind, how does a specific department within an agency track its assets, track power consumption and accurately make additions, moves and deletions to their infrastructure given that now they are in a very large data center with many other departments under the same agency?

A solid Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) tool is the answer. These tools can track all the data on each data center device or item. This data includes power consumption at the branch circuit, rack or PDU level as well as information on when the equipment was purchased, what version of firmware it’s running, when the warranty expires and, most importantly, what rack it’s in and if it’s really there.

DCIM is an excellent tool given the number of contractors that tend to come and go during the course of a data center support contract. DCIM can also serve as a terrific source of “knowledge transfer” for when a change of management occurs or a new contractor comes on board, so the new team knows what they are inheriting in the data center.

To ensure the IT infrastructure remains available, before an organization jumps on the “cloud” bandwagon, it is important to identify the tools that will be needed to control, manage and secure this new “cloud-based” architecture. With application virtualization and additional access options such as mobile smartphones and tablets – not always owned by the business – how do you ensure secure access to your network? The costs to rip and replace existing infrastructures can be exorbitant.

Raritan’s Cloud Management Solution centralizes management and provides out-of-band remote access of critical IT resources from anywhere. Combined with tight security, power and environmental control, Raritan’s solution operates in private and in hybrid clouds and provides IT administrators with the tools necessary to visualize assets, troubleshoot issues, restore operations and ensure availability…anytime and anywhere. And for those businesses that are considering a public cloud, Raritan’s Cloud Management Solution gives cloud providers management capabilities across their network infrastructure

For more information on how Raritan’s Cloud Management Solution can help your virtualization plans, contact your authorized Raritan representative or see our website at:   http://www.raritan.com/resources/application-briefs/cloud-Infrastructure-remote-management-solution-application-brief.pdf.

http://blog.raritan.com/2012/03/yet-another-security-issue-with-remote-access-software/

Found a good article on f-secure.com with advice on how to protect your environment. 

Also makes the point that SMB’s may not be aware that contractors enable RDP to help maintain their IT environment.

Click to see the article