Cyclades 5000 manual P l i c a t i o n s, N e f i t s

AlterPathTM Manager 5000

Out-of-Band Infrastructure Administration

The AlterPath™ Manager 5000 serves as the command and control center for the AlterPath System of products designed to provide secure, remote and consolidated out-of-band infrastructure (OOBI) administration. The AlterPath Manager 5000 provides high availability with redundant power and disc drives. Its ability to scale up to 2,048 data logging/console sessions and 32,768 console ports in a 2U form factor provides the expandability and flexibility necessary to support future enhancements and applications. The AlterPath Manager 5000 enhances out-of-band access by providing a higher level of logging, automation, security and software functionality compatible with next-generation data centers, enabling true lights-out operation.

A data center's heterogeneous environment requires OOBI access to the IT assets within the enterprise through many different physical interfaces, including RS-232 serial console ports, KVM ports, power control ports, server blades, and service processor managers such as IPMI. The AlterPath Manager 5000's view consolidation functionality enables a centralized view of all management ports on secure, redundant interfaces, and provides a layer of abstraction to hide the underlying connectivity methods from the user.

In large deployments, the task of deploying and maintaining the OOBI is a huge undertaking that can overburden the network operations center or networking teams. Without a central command and control center like the AlterPath Manager 5000, operational costs and complexity increase. The AlterPath Manager 5000's change and configuration management functionality eases deployment. It tracks and maintains configuration files and firmware versions for all IT assets, while minimizing extra overhead. In addition, the health-monitoring module ensures that the OOBI is always available when problems occur.

Traditional systems management tools such as HP OpenView, CA Unicenter® and IBM® Tivoli® can monitor the health of the production network, log events and notify system administrators of the need for human intervention. However, when network problems occur, these tools are only useful to inform the operator of problems and cannot provide information to help to diagnose and fix the problem. The AlterPath Manager 5000's event management feature complements the system management tools by providing access to console data logs and change history, ensuring the operator has a clear understanding of the status of the equipment before the problem occurred. The event notification feature can inform the operator of the exact problem as soon as it occurs.

Information security depends not only on the availability of strong security mechanisms but also on a consistent security policy implemented across the data center. The AlterPath Manager 5000 serves as a secure, central point of access for the entire OOBI, including serial, KVM and power, blade servers, service processors like IPMI, iLO and other interfaces such as Microsoft® Windows® 2003 Emergency Management Services (EMS) consoles. By using the AlterPath Manager 5000, all access to equipment console ports is independently logged and monitored to allow full auditing for security and quality purposes. It creates a uniform layer of access control and authentication across different media and target systems. This simplifies the security architecture.

A p p l i c a t i o n s :

•Secure, remote OOBI administration

•IPMI management

•Consolidated OOBI administration and provisioning

•24/7 mission-critical network operations

•Lights-out, automated data center administration

•Data logging/archiving for regulator y and audit compliance (Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, etc.)

•Audited change management

B e n e f i t s :

•Reduced MTTR

•Reduced operational costs for OOBI administration

•Easier and faster provisioning of OOBI

•Reduced management overhead

•Centralized security policy

•Audited change histor y

Application Example