| Sys Admin Extraordinaire |

The product seems to work fine, but the documentation is a disappointment. I had to send an e-mail to them to complain about that and never received a response. Also, no one contacted me to followup on the case and apparently it's been closed. I won't purchases Avocent products again unless there's absolutely nothing else that can compete with them. Not only was the documentation bad, but the support was worse. (more…)

The KVM “console” itself is just the keyboard, display, and pointing device mounted into a single rack-mountable unit. The KVM "switch" is what allows you to connect multiple servers to one set of keyboard, display, and pointing device. So you need the KVM console and switch together along with adapters to connect the servers to the KVM switch. When pricing out a KVM setup, make sure you know who much each adapter costs because it will add up as you add more servers to the switch. (more…)

For the past week I’ve been trying to find a product that would do the following:

1.) Boot older Dell PowerEdge servers off a USB drive or CD.
2.) Recognize and access the RAID volumes.
3.) Let me run some type of DoD-level disk wiping utility on the RAID volumes.

We have several older servers that we’d like to give away or trash, but need to wipe the drives before doing so.

It didn’t seem like an obscure request, but after doing a few searches, I was surprised to not find anything that really met my needs. (more…)