What we use, and are very happy with, is a piece of software, combined with a lot of serial ports on a computer. The software (conserver/console, from Purdue), gives us things like
I definitely agree! The conserver software is one of the most helpful things for SysAdmin's to use. I have been using it for 4 years now, and it is the best way I have found to manage serial consoles.
If you want to use the conserver package, the only thing to keep in mind is that the server part of the software wants to see local devices, this might exclude some of the terminal servers out there. (The Etherlite comes with drivers that makes it appear as local devices on a Solaris box)
This is not true. We use a version of the conserver package which works with either local ports, or with "telnet ts-1 5016" type of terminal server ports.
We have used the following Ethernet-based terminal servers with this software with much success:
- Cisco 2511 - Xylogics Micro-Annex & Annex-3 - IOLAN+ rack-mount
Of these, the IOLAN+ seems to be the most cost-effective.
You can get our (publically available) version of the conserver package from:
http://www.gnac.com/conserver/