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June 19, 2009
• Vol.31 Issue 17
Page(s) 22 in print issue
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Simplified Remote Access
Avocent’s KVM Over IP Solutions Help Software Company Stay On Top Of Its Network
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 The bigger a company gets, the wider its reach can be. Global enterprises today have offices in dozens of countries and employees communicating with each other and with customers all over the world. But companies are like armies in that the longer their communication lines are, the more vulnerable they are to being cut.
Consider SAS (www.sas.com), a software company in Cary, N.C., that makes the Statistical Analysis System software (hence the company’s name) that has been widely used since the 1970s. Its business analytics software is used at 45,000 sites in more than 100 countries. The company itself is also widely distributed, with 11,000 employees in more than 50 countries and four data centers on its huge campus in Cary.
SAS is a global 24/7 operation. Employees in India and China take over when employees in the United States go home for the day. They monitor software builds while U.S. people are sleeping, and they test to make sure the software is building and running correctly.
It used to be that when an employee in India noticed a problem with a build, he called it in, and someone in the United States had to wake up at 2 in the morning, drive to the campus, and figure out what was wrong. Not only did this mean awful wake-up times and driving in to work in the wee hours of the morning, it also meant annoyed IT people who might discover that all that was required to fix it was the click of a button. And if an administrator was on vacation, fixes sometimes had to be delayed until vacation was over.
This was a problem even during the day, when problems cropped up at one of the four data centers. “The campus is a mile long, with about 30 buildings, and it was also sometimes necessary to move from one part of the campus to another data center where there problem was,” says Bart Smith, information systems engineer for SAS. “It added up to a lot of wasted time.”
 Switching To Remote Access
About two and a half years ago, SAS decided to use KVM switches over IP so that its employees could remotely access any system, no matter which data center it was running out of, from any computer. It chose DSR KVM switches from Avocent (www.avocent.com), a provider of IT infrastructure in Huntsville, Ala. Now, those same IT employees who were driving in to work at 2 a.m. can log on to their own home computers, log in to the right DSR switch, and diagnose and fix the problem from home. They can do the same thing from their own computers during the day, even if the systems they’re working on are running out of a data center across campus. “It saves me several hours a day,” Smith says.
SAS has deployed about 32 switches from Avocent, including 20 DSRs and 10 Cyclades, which provide remote console access and can also be used to manage power or to access equipment even if the network is down.
With 36 systems that are business-critical, the company can’t afford to have any system go down for too long. For example, the system that builds new versions of SAS runs all night long, and any downtime for that system could result in fractured customer relationships, lost revenue, or both.
With Avocent’s switches, SAS doesn’t have to worry so much about system downtime. The switches allow multiple computers to be controlled by the same keyboard, video, or mouse so that any system can be monitored, diagnosed, and brought up-to-speed remotely by any user who has permission to log on to the system. In fact, even if the network is down, users can still access the systems they need by logging in to the KVM switch. Home users simply go to a Web address to log in to the right switch.
Using Avocent’s DSView 3 software, Smith says, SAS controls which user has access to what system over the switch by managing which systems they can see at all. “Sometimes people may have an account that allows them access to a certain system, but we really don’t want them to access it,” Smith says. “So we hide it, and it cuts down on unnecessary errors.”
Smith and his team considered other KVM switches, but the key selling point of the Avocent switch was that it only took up one port on the network. It also only takes up 1U of rack space, which saves the company money.
Implementing KVM
Implementation was a little rocky to begin with because the IT workload was already heavy. And DSView 3 has a lot of features and capabilities, which meant a learning curve and also a lot of time to get the settings for each figured out. While fine-tuning those settings, Smith says, the team ran into a couple of hiccups. “I initially set up the software to use my credentials for authorization into our domain,” he says. “But when I changed my credentials, it locked everybody—including me—out of the system, and I had to call Avocent to get them to reset the admin password.”
Smith says that they could have set up the system so that users’ credentials were local to the KVM switches, but they didn’t want to have to maintain all that. So now it’s set up so that when users change their passwords, they’re updated on the switch, as well, and nobody gets locked out.
SAS also learned that turning on the secure settings on the KVM switch prevents local access to that switch and requires users to log in only through DSView 3. So the company has turned off those settings and relies on password security instead.
Smith also discovered that although DSView 3 works well with the Internet Explorer browser, it occasionally fails to play nice with other browsers, such as Firefox or Chrome. “We have both Windows and Unix deployed, and our Unix users really like Firefox, so occasionally we have to tweak some settings to get it to work with Firefox,” Smith says.
Smith also learned that some of the older systems that were accessed by the KVM switch didn’t work well with one or the other of the input standards. “Our older systems didn’t recognize the USB 2.0 standard, and we’d have issues where we could get keyboard access but no mouse access, or vice versa,” he says. “Fortunately, it’s a one-time change to just downgrade the standard to 1.0 or PS/2. Sometimes if you update the BIOS or a driver, it will work, but now when we run into it, we just change the setting and keep rolling.”
The switches have definitely done what they were supposed to do. “One thing we’re tasked with is figuring out how to do more with less, and this is definitely a success story in that sense,” Smith says. He also adds that the switches have not led to a decrease in IT headcount. “In this case, ‘doing more with less’ means ‘Now we can give you more to do,’” he says. 
by Holly Dolezalek
Avocent DSR KVM Over IP Switches
Avocent’s DSR KVM over IP switches let users remotely access systems and servers in the data center via an onboard Web interface.
“One thing we’re tasked with is figuring out how to do more with less, and [using Avocent’s switches] is definitely a success story in that sense,” says Bart Smith, information systems engineer for SAS.
(866) 286-2368
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