The IPMI Experiment - A New Direction

You may have noticed that for awhile we were offering IPMI services with our dedicated services, but that that mention has since been removed. We had attempted improving the overall customer experience by utilizing IPMI cards in all of our higher end systems, but the implementation proved to create more issues than it solved. Overall, the additional setup time needed to configure/setup the IPMI card, complications with necessary network changes, and then spotty, at best, performance combined to make IPMI not worth the trouble for us. We also feel that having a more reliable remote reboot configuration, the APC power strips we are currently using, is better for our customers as well. I know some of you were looking forward to some of the additional features our IPMI implementation would have offered, but I have some good news as well.

To compensate for a lack of IPMI we are working on a couple other things. First of all, before we decided to give IPMI a try, we had started working on an internal system which would allow customers to initiate OS reinstalls instantly and at no additional charge. The system would also allow you to boot into a recovery mode, which would allow you to login to your servers and change the boot kernel, correct network settings, run disk checks, and run other diagnostics/tools to repair/recover your system yourself. We are continuing on that project and hope to have it at least partially available in the coming weeks. There are also plans in place to bring in some more single port KVM over IP units which we can rent to customers, in 12 hour blocks, at no additional charge one time per month, while additional time can be purchased. We may also begin offering permanent KVM over IP as an add-on to our systems. For the KVM over IP, we need to do further testing on the exact units we will be proceeding with, but we should be able to begin that program shortly after Thanksgiving.