Altusen KN9116 IP-based KVM Switch

In addition to acting as a 16-port KVM switch, this one also lets you control and access your servers remotely over IP, and that too simultaneously

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

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Imagine that you have your data center in Mumbai, and your offsite disaster management site in Chennai. You also have another branch office in Delhi. Now, how would you monitor and manage the servers across all these locations? One is through remote VPN connectivity, but that would require connecting to each server individually and would be fairly time consuming. That's where this KVM switch becomes useful. It's a 16-port network KVM switch from Aten, which can be cascaded with up to 8 such boxes, so that you can manage up to 128 machines remotely.

The box can work as a standard KVM switch where you can connect all servers/machines to it and then fix just one monitor, keyboard and mouse to its output port and use them by one-by-one switching to the PC. Additionally, if you provide an IP-address to the box, you can also access it by using any SSL supporting browser and then access all the servers/machines from there. The device has two sets of clients. One is for Windows and the other is platform-independent (Java-based). The Windows client provides you with a few more features than the Java-based one, such as monitoring all 16 machines simulations simultaneously. But the Java-client makes this device usable from virtually any OS. For that, all you need is a browser with Java runtime installed.

Configuring and using this device is a breeze. It took us around 20 minutes to unpack the device and configure it for the first time with 6-machines connected to it. And most of the time is spent in just connecting the cables to the machine and the box. So you can imagine that the actual configuration needed for the box was not more than 5 minutes or so. To configure the device, all you have to do is to connect a monitor, keyboard and mouse set to its output port and a network cable to its 10/100 Mbps Ethernet port. After the connection, just switch on the device and you'll be prompted with an On-screen Display from where you can set all the necessary settings such as the IP-address of the box, the Hot-key settings and the logging options. Now just click on any machine on the first tab of the menu and you will get a full screen view of that machine. You can also click on the array button to simultaneously monitor all 16 machines. To access it over the network, you have to go to https:<ip-address-of-the-box> link and then click on either the Windows client or the Java client link, depending on which OS you are using.

The device lets you simultaneously monitor 16 different machines from one single console

One small bug, which we found in this device, is that when you access it remotely using which-ever client, you will see two mouse pointers. One is of the remote machine's OS and other is of the device itself. And sometimes (mostly) both the pointers are not in sync. This might make the usage of the device slightly annoying at times. The device treats this as a known bug and provides you with a Hot-key which is supposed to synchronize both pointers. But in our test, the synchronization only lasts for some time and both pointers separate gradually. The security, authentication and encryption options that shipped with the device are really impressive. For example, the KVM provides a two-level password login for administrators, a 128-bit SSL encryption and an automatic logout for idle sessions.

Bottom Line: If you need to remotely manage all your servers, right down to the BIOS level, then this is a great choice.

Anindya Roy

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