How remote diagnostic tools can help you reduce downtime across Edge locations

The theme of data center management today is liberation — from on-site management processes, costly and limiting hardware, and reliability issues. Data center managers and critical infrastructure directors are increasingly using virtualization to reduce their dependence on hardware

In this article, we explore how you can leverage remote diagnostic tools to:

• Optimize the performance of equipment across all of your edge locations
• Increase availability and reduce downtime
• Save time and resources by tackling issues remotely

Edge complexity requires a new approach

The growth of edge computing is creating new demands on IT organizations. In this article, IT at the Edge: Visibilit and Management for Growth, we review what is driving this edge growth and some considerations for better visibility, clarity, and management of IT equipment to support organizational growth. But what happens when problems arise? This eBook reviews how to understand, manage, and resolve outages at the edge in the most cost- and resource-effective way.

The IT market is changing and so must the solutions

Today’s IT

• On-premises equipment
• Little or no remote access
• Unable to meet growing performance demands
• Manual IT configuration
• Challenged with multiple management products
• Aged technoloyg and capability

Tomorrow’s IT

• Manage hybrid environment
• Enable remote workplace
• Scale systems from enterprise to edge
• Automate data center IT management
• Build open standards and platforms
• High security measures

Managing problems at the edge

Data centers are typically strategically sited to boost business performance and are run by both on-site and remote staff. Edge sites, on the other hand, are located wherever your users are. They may be unmanned and hard to reach or even considered to be dark sites. If your edge sites go down, they could take employees offline or eliminate digital product and service delivery to part of your customer base.

Edge growth is driving the following challenges:

Diagnostics

• Need to quickly diagnose problems when they occur without being on site
• Must have visibility and data across vast amounts of equipment

Maintaining Uptime

• Need to see device and equipment status to understand outages
• Need to ensure status and continuity without skilled resources on site

Skill Limitations

• Organizations don’t have skilled staff everywhere they are needed
• Unqualified staff physically on site can inadvertently damage equipment

Cost of Recovery

• Edge growth makes accessing all the physical sites unreasonable or unsustainable
• Sending teams on site to resolve issues is costly and time consuming

Remotely diagnose, troubleshoot, and restore outages

The theme of data center management today is liberation — from on-site management processes, costly and limiting hardware, and reliability issues. Data center managers and critical infrastructure directors are increasingly using virtualization to reduce their dependence on hardware. These leaders want to reduce their data center footprint; virtualize infrastructure tools; and take full advantage of cloud capabilities, such as ultra-fast provisioning and the ability to scale instantly.

Today’s advanced edge sites need to ensure infrastructure resilience with always-on, always-connected out-of-band management to recover from any outages, especially at remote sites, rapidly.

Here’s how it works:

• View health and status of all devices across sites
• Receive notifications when a problem arises
• Diagnose and understand which devices cause an outage or issue
• Remotely access equipment and devices from anywhere
• Use cellular capabilities to connect to equipment and restore service, even when the network is down or doesn’t exist
• Recover systems to healthy state by remotely connecting into compute, network or physical infrastructure devices
• Recycle power on systems as needed
• Use audit events and alarm history to understand what may be contributing to device issues

Key considerations for selecting an IT management tool

Pursue software-first strategies

There will always be a market for data centers, however, even cloud and colocation providers are pursuing software-first strategies to increase business flexibility and speed of deployment. All users benefit by gaining high availability of resources, strengthening business continuity and disaster ecovery, and minimizing their dependence on physical devices that need to be replaced at end of life.

Extend virtualization gains

Companies already have virtualized applications, desktops, networks, servers, and storage. Now that so many data center and IT teams are working remotely, these professionals would like to virtualize management tools as well, benefitting from tools that can easily be migrated to any server and provide economies of scale.

Improve visibility and control

With virtualization, teams use automated processes to monitor, manage, upgrade, power up and down, scale, and replicate resources, improving their control.

The Benefits:

• Improved visibility and control
• Increased business resilience
• Improved scaling
• Reduced total cost of ownership

Conclusion

With the right tools, you can ensure strong management, diagnostics, and resolution of IT equipment for all your edge locations. Ensure optimal performance of your devices and equipment across all your edge locations to increase availability, reduce downtime, and remotely and save time and resources