IT teams responsible for data centers, colocation facilities, and test labs face a persistent challenge when it comes to providing affordable, timely maintenance and troubleshooting for their organizations’ IT infrastructure. Facilities aren’t often staffed around the clock, and sending someone on-site to address every hardware failure or issue is slow and expensive, especially for colocation customers that already pay for local staff support. Additionally, when critical infrastructure goes down, organizations can’t afford to endure an outage during the time it takes to get a technician on-site.
IT teams typically employ tools to enable remote access, but the most common have significant limitations and drawbacks. Remote desktop protocol (RDP), for instance, provides access, but only while the operating system is running. If the OS crashes or fails to boot, or if a firmware change ends the session, RDP is useless, and IT will need to send a technician for an on-site visit. There are also security concerns, as open software ports make RDP vulnerable to attack.
Another tool, physical intelligent platform management interface (IPMI), sits below the OS layer, so it can be used regardless of the state of the OS. However, legacy IPMI implementations have historically been associated with security concerns, particularly when exposed to public or poorly secured networks. Many organizations now restrict IPMI access or supplement it with additional security controls. Some organizations have moved to Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Redfish because it provides stronger security. But its security behaviors, such as session timeouts, rate limiting, and lockout policies, are undefined and left to the implementer, so improper implementation poses a significant risk.
KVM (keyboard, video, and mouse)-over-IP addresses both the reliability and security concerns of RDP, IPMI, and DMTF Redfish. KVM connects directly to hardware, which gives administrators remote BIOS-level access and full control of a machine in any state, whether it’s online, crashed, or powered off. Access extends into pre-boot environments, so a remote user can recover systems experiencing OS, boot, firmware, or configuration failures and perform tasks such as OS reinstalls, BIOS configuration changes, and remote media mounting without requiring an on-site visit.
“Regarding security, IP KVM comes out of the box with some standard best practices from a security standpoint,” said Paul Mott, product management director at Raritan. “It’s almost like a firewall for out-of-band management, and it doesn’t expose every server connected to the network, making it much harder to compromise a massive amount of systems for something like a DDoS attack.”
Use cases for KVM extend well beyond the traditional data center. In industrial manufacturing, hardware KVM lets support staff clear machine errors remotely instead of walking out onto the factory floor. IT services firms use it to maintain 24/7 access at client sites, including “laptop locker” setups where an employee drops off a device and a remote technician handles the fix. In healthcare, KVM can provide a physician view or even drive diagnostic equipment remotely, allowing one specialist to support multiple satellite facilities and helping healthcare networks address staffing shortages while improving patient access to diagnostics.
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