People who have just been introduced to the concept of out-of-band management by reading this document may be wondering what kind of practical situations would benefit from console management. Having access to all the console ports without the need to switch cables or to move to another workstation is great, but problems that completely disable the network cannot rely on in-band management tools.

Here are some scenarios where having a SRENA solution is the difference between being able to diagnose and solve a problem quickly and having to go onsite or be out of operation for a long time.

A server crashed and the Data Center is unattended.
One of the servers in the cluster running the e-commerce application crashes and sends a panic message to the console port.
Life Sign Sentinel (LSS) or the clustering software monitors the alarms generated by the SRENA and sends periodic pings to the servers in the cluster. When it detects that one of the servers is not responding properly, it pages you and sends an email with the panic message captured by the unit.
You connect to the ENS 8 SRENA system over the Internet using the link sent to you in the e mail. You review the console messages prior to the OS panic/crash and find that there is no specific event causing it. It was probably an OS crash caused by some software error. You send a reboot sequence to the console port; the server reboots and resumes operation. In this example, the SRENA solution enabled you to set trigger events and generate alarms to warn you about the problem and then allowed you to locate the troubled device with pager message or link to the ENS8 and the failed device. The ENS8 then enabled you to remotely reboot a server to restore operation.

Router is malfunctioning and the site is down.
Someone at your POS (Point of Sale) retail outlet reports that the entire site is down. In-band management tools such as HP Open View or telnet are useless because the remote network is inaccessible. Using a modem and a phone line, you remotely connect to the SRENA unit at the affected site and look for the problem. LSS tells you the entire site is down, and that there is something wrong with one of the backbone routers.
By using the link provided by LSS to the failed device, you quickly find the LAN interface that is not working. You temporarily reconfigure other routers so that the traffic takes an alternate path, restoring the site’s connectivity. Or you gain root access to the router through your SRENA unit and reconfigure the affected router. In this example, the ENS 8 technology allowed you to access the equipment at the remote location even when the site had lost its network connection.