Kensington & Chelsea's disaster recovery goes remote

The Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea is investing in remote server management tools to manage its new disaster recovery (DR) facility and existing data centre in the event of a 'lights out' situation.

The Borough is deploying technology from IT infrastructure management provider, Avocent to provide its 20-strong server support team with the ability to remotely control and administer more than 200 servers across both the new site and its existing primary server farm.

The Borough decided it needed a new DR site in a location separate to its the core facilities to provide dedicated backup if a major event, like a power cut, should threaten operations. It will ensure that key functions, such as the Borough's website, will remain constantly available.

Keith Newman, IT production manager at Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea said: "A lack of DR facilities had been highlighted as a potential [IT] weakness through our ongoing risk assessment."

He added: "When we decided to create our own DR site, we knew that going 'lights-out' would mitigate risk as much as possible."

The authority's new DSView 3 management software console from Avocent will support this 'lights-out' objective by enabling the IT team to securely access to servers and other devices in the new facility. It will also enable the monitoring, diagnosis and resolution of issues without needing to physically enter the facility, with a view to saving time and further increasing security.

The team will also be able to access finer levels of operational data centre detail with the deployment of the Avocent MergePoint 5200, a service processor management solution which enables IT managers to maximise the built-in intelligent platform management interface (IPMI) capabilities of their servers.

IPMI is an open standard service processor embedded within servers that provides power control and health monitoring capabilities. It resides on a dedicated baseboard management controller so, even if the operating system crashes, the server can be remotely re-booted.

In addition to building its new DR site, Kensington & Chelsea will refresh the Avocent switches previously used in its primary server farm, allowing the IT team to access new functionality, such as virtual media, that reduces the reliance on having a physical presence in the data centre.

Newman said: "The reduced risk of downtime, coupled with greater visibility of server performance, will help to ensure the availability of key services and information resources for the Borough."

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