Beyond Emergencies — The Greater Role for Serial Consoles

October 2019
Sponsored by Vertiv

Presented by Howard Blevins and Jonathan Heath

Continuing Education

Use the following learning objectives to focus your study while reading this month’s Continuing Education article.

Learning Objectives - After reading this article, you will be able to:

  1. Identify typical serial console “emergency use” scenarios.
  2. Discuss how serial consoles can function as a security settings aggregator.
  3. Monitor, manage, and control multiple critical facility and IT devices via serial connectivity.
  4. Examine sensor, actuator, and BMS integration and alerting.

Serial consoles are extremely beneficial to address emergency situations such as accessing locked-up devices and loss of IP band connectivity. But did you know they can also make daily data center and IT operations run more efficiently?

Join this webinar to learn how serial connectivity for access and management of remote locations and devices can assist with:

  • Monitoring, management, and control of rack power distribution units (rPDU); uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems; computer room air conditioning (CRAC) units; building management systems (BMS); leak detection, and environmental devices
  • Provisioning and setup of devices
  • Aggregation of multiple device and user-level security settings
Beyond Emergencies



Blevins

Howard Blevins has over 20 years of experience in critical infrastructure and IT product management, marketing, business development, and channel management. His previous work experience includes six years of active duty in the U.S. Army as an infantry officer and research and development officer, stationed overseas and in the U.S. Currently, he is the offering manager for Vertiv/Avocent’s IT solutions portfolio. He holds a B.S. from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and an M.S.M. from the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Heath

Jonathan Heath has over 15 years of experience in the design and productization of networking equipment in fields ranging from the Internet of Things to datacenter monitoring. Starting out as a hardware and software design engineer for the telecom industry, Heath has also served in marketing, field sales, customer support, and solution architecture roles. Currently, he is a product manager for Vertiv/Avocent, guiding the business and technical aspects of the family of devices responsible for out-of-band management of critical data center equipment. He is the inventor of patented networking software and a graduate of Mississippi State University, with a degree in electrical engineering.