On Mon, 2 Apr 2001, Joe Luchtenberg wrote:
Please forgive the ignorance of a sales guy lurking an engineers' discussion list...
Why would you want this type of solution instead of/in addition to FilerView? Granted, FilerView is network-bound (correct?), but if you need to dial in under a complete network outage wouldn't any RAS/terminal server solution do? (I'd be concerned about security issues with my filer console ports connected indirectly to a modem, though.) For those familiar with other remote management solutions, how does NetApp's remote manageability compare with, say, Compaq's Remote Insight Board Lights Out Edition? TIA. Joe
I think most of the reasons for this have already been covered. Mine are:
- GUIs suck (I'm a command line weenie).
- You can invariably do a lot more from the console that you can via a GUI.
- A console server gets you out of band access to your devices. Throw in a (properly secured) modem and you don't even need a functioning network, or a functioning IP stack on either end to be able to access your boxes.
- If your hardware has the necessary functionality you can do anything that doesn't require physical access remotely (including powering up and down devices).
- The conserver package we use allows every single command and every character of output to be logged to disk, so when things go wrong you can trace back *exactly* what has happened.
-Ronan