Enterprise Data Center Design and Methodology

Remote systems management, like remote access, has many advantages. It offers the ability to work remotely, whether you are snowed in at home or at a hotel attending a conference. It allows you to get the best people available from the largest labor pool. Monitoring and Management systems like Sun Management Center (Sun MC), BMC Patrol, and others allow you to monitor and manage devices from pagers and cell phones from anywhere around the world.

Effective systems management is critical to a smoothly running data center, and even more critical when managing remotely. System configuration information (hardware, software, patches, etc.) is the foundation for remote systems management. It is critical that this information be accurate and reliable. Elizabeth Purcell, a Sun performance availability engineering systems engineer, presented a paper on this topic at the October 2001 SuperG conference. For more in-depth information on this subject, see Ms. Purcell's paper reproduced in Appendix A, "Managing System Configurations."

Remote systems management is also handy if you have multiple data centers around the world. For example, you might have data centers in Los Angeles, London, and Tokyo. Each city is 8 hours from the next. The administrative networks at each of these Command Centers have connections to the administrative networks of the other two sites. The London crew has coverage of all systems in all three locations from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. GMT. At 5:00 p.m. when the crew in London is done for the day, it is 9:00 a.m. in Los Angeles and the L.A. crew takes the next shift. At 5:00 p.m. in L.A. it is 9:00 a.m. the next day in Tokyo. The Tokyo crew takes over till 5:00 p.m. when the London crew is back at work at 9:00 a.m. London time. This is built-in 24 hour , 7 day a week coverage of all data centers, with no one crew having to work "graveyard" hours.

The biggest disadvantage to remote systems management is the possibility of security violations such as someone cracking into the administrative networks. While tools like firewalls and secure shell can help reduce this risk, it is highly recommended that you have your own data center personnel who specialize in this area of technology. Or, you can outsource this type of work to firms that specialize in data, system, and network security. This flexibility is not without risk and cost; however, you might find that these risk and costs are more than offset by the flexibility and productivity you can achieve through remote systems management.