Justification or Getting Console Servers in the Door

If you have not yet received budgetary approval to pursue a console server solution, then you will likely need to provide a justification to purchase the console server. Purchasing approval can be difficult to obtain, especially if the approver does not understand or appreciate the technology. Here are some suggestions and approaches that have proven useful for others.

Disaster Recovery

The major reason for having a console server is to speed a recovery operation. Often, the approach used to sell this idea, however, is to say "this will make my life easier" or "this will let me fix it without being there". Although these are true statements, they do not represent the business view of what is advantageous about making your life easier. This justification must be translated to "the console server will reduce after-hour response times by 1 to 1.5 hours", for example.

If your business uses SLAs, uptime statistics, or must either report or pay for downtime to the customer, then these metrics can be pretty accurately used to estimate the time and/or cost saved.

Audit Time

Because of Sarbanes-Oxley, everyone is working on audits. One of the common themes of audits is the requirement to protect data as part of a data management policy. Typically, the features required for data protection include tiered access, additional logging, and encryption of sensitive data. Console servers can help meet these requirements by providing tiered access to the console port (with multiple authentication approaches possible), logging and alerting of console events, and encrypted access to the management port.

Phased Approach

If you support a large environment, it can be very difficult to justify enough console servers for the whole environment. Therefore, a phased approach over time and budget cycles is best. Individual console servers are very affordable and can be deployed to the most critical servers initially.

Hardware Refresh

Console servers can be brought in as part of a hardware refresh. The cost is minimal compared to the total system cost.

Hardware Standards

Console servers should become part of the standard build-out process much like fiber, Ethernet, and storage, and each system purchased must either have a free port on existing console servers or a new console server purchased.