Centerline

Epicenter’s Centerline is a complete managed rack system, it’s remit is to provide a frame work for achieving maximum availability of services, operational continuity and minimal operating costs.

What does Centerline provide?

• Remote & secure KVM via IP
• Local analogue KVM connectivity
• Serial consol connectivity
• Power management
• Environmental monitoring
• Asset management
• Reporting

What is Centerline?

Centerline GUI front end allows users to get visibility of the data centre as a whole as well as individual cabinets and devices:

Multiple sites	Multiple racks	Multiple devices

Centerline consists of an intelligent hardware platform that utilises rack space to it's maximum efficiency providing maximum connectivity with minimal cabling. Each managed rack contains a 1u Centerline brain, a 42u connectivity column and up to 4 x 28 port intelligent PDU's.

Why use Centerline?

Security

Centerline provides a protective umbrella for management either using its own 3 level user database or existing LDAP/AD security policies ensuring that your infrastructure is protected from both outside and within the data centre. The reporting feature in the context of KVM provides a complete access log for accountability.

Scalability

Centerline is a completely modular system meaning that racks, devices and users can all be added to the management framework at a minimal cost. At full capacity in each rack Centerline can support 4 concurrent users, 42 devices, 112 intelligent power ports - across 4 PDU's, 4 environmental probes and redundant network connectivity.

Economy

Centerline has many features aimed at bringing economy to data centre operations; individual port metering on PDU's allow data centre managers to break down their carbon foot print to device level whilst KVM via IP and power cycling negates the need for engineer call outs unless hardware needs changing. The reporting feature provides a retrospective view of power consumption within the data centre.

Safety

Centerline maintains a number of safety thresholds including maximum power draw, maximum temperatures and maximum humidity, automated responses and alerts can be configured to occur to thresholds being reached and other detrimental events occurring.

Who should use Centerline?

Centerline is suitable for use in many different types of data centre and applications:

Centerline in a co-location hosting environment:

Hosting environments can be complicated with dispersed and local areas of responsibility which are constantly changing to meet new customer requirements, Centerline allows delegation of tasks and functions and enforces the management policies. Deploying Centerline in a Co-Lo application adds true value to the host's service with potentially increasing the revenue from every U space in the data centre.

The Customer's benefits

• 24/7 Secure KVM and consol connectivity to all rack mounted hardware
• Remote power cycling
• 24/7 visibility of environmental conditions inside customer cabinets
• Alerts to specific events in customer's cabinets
• Real time asset management of hardware in host's data centre
• Reports and audits on power consumption, environmentals and device access
• Centralised deployment of patches and upgrades

The Host's benefits

• Ability to monitor draw at device, rack or Zone level and meter customer's electricity consumption
• Monitoring environmental conditions in the cabinets, zone or data centre as a whole
• Ability to remotely open and close PDU ports according to customer's requirements
• Reporting on environmental and power trends within all areas and levels of the data centre
• SNMP, email and SMS alerts to specific power and environmental events
• Automatic preconfigured resposes to specific power and environmental events
• Automatic logging of all rack mounted hardware and its location in the data centre
• Maximisation of U space
• Optional remote locking and unlocking of cabinet

Centerline in a production data centre:

For the business that depends on it's data centre Centerline focuses on what the business gets from it's data centre and provides a frame work for achieving this. Designers of the system have taken into account the critical role of the people involved in managing a companies IT infrastructure and facilitates a rapid, secure and accountable means of each person performing their designated function.

Centerline in a managed services application:

Often when a managed services provider takes on a new customer's infrastructure there are disparate management systems, dispersed sites and incoherent management policies, Centerline brings them all together providing a singe user interface, covering all sites and either encompassing or replacing existing management systems.

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