Alan Chhabra has a great post over on his blog about going dark in your data center by adding remote management tools. While Alan's post focuses on server management and implementing virtualization and associated remote management tools, the conversation can easily be extended to remote power management as well.
By implementing power distribution units or managers with remote capabilities, facilities and system administrators can eliminate the need to dispatch personnel to remote locations for management. For example, if a server locks up, the system admin can remove power from that outlet via a web management tool like Server Technology's Sentry Power Manager software. Such tools could prevent massive hardware failures as well by showing you hot spots within the data center floor. By setting environmental parameters unique to each facility you could then begin to shed non-critical devices when those thresholds are exceeded.
So, if you're going dark in your data center the best practice would be to marry your remote server management tools with remote power management.
One of our contributors calls it "Administering from the Bahamas". He's big on something called PXE booting and using SSH cellphone software for emergency server management.
Posted by: Matt | April 12, 2007 at 02:24 PM