Well, most PC hardware vendors offer remote access cards of some type. Compaq offers something like that (Remote Insight, I think it's called), for example. I don't admin the windows stuff myself, but that's what our Windows admins use for that sort of thing.

Also, it's not out yet, but Raritan's TeleReach box may become very handy for that sort of thing. We currently use Raritan's Paragon switches to get consoles for a large host of platforms: Sun, IBM, HP, SGI, PC, Netapp, etc.

It's nice to have a single console switch that controls all of our devices, rather than one device for the UNIX consoles, another device for the PC consoles, etc. My goal is that when an engineer walks into one of our labs, he can sit at any console to control any machine. (It's also nice to access each platform through its native console. Figuring out the serial pinouts for each vendor can be quite the pain.)

If the TeleReach service works as advertised, it would make everything on the Paragon switch available over IP. Unfortunately, it sounds like it will utilize a proprietary windows-based client. Also how good the performance is remains to be seen. It's a step in the right direction though, I think.

As for FilerView, I use it a lot and like it, but in a serious downtime situation, you may a) have problems with the network in the first place which would make FilerView useless, and b) you're probably in a hurry and while I like Filerview it is a bit slow to load. Certain things are just much faster to do via the console.