Sun Microsystems Inc. next month will offer a new device designed to help data center administrators more easily manage potentially hundreds of Sun server appliances.
The Cobalt Control Station, which will list at $4,999, will offer a central management device from which system administrators can monitor multiple Sun Cobalt RaO and Qube server appliances.
"What were doing is basically giving the tools and resources to the system administrator to do the rudimentary system management tasks," said Marc Tamres, product line manager for the Palo Alto, Calif., companys service appliance business unit. "For example, if you wanted to update several hundred appliances at one time, this is a conduit through which you do that."
The Cobalt Control Station, which will become available Nov. 20, can also help recognize potential problems even before actual system failures occur, Tamres said.
The systems health monitoring capabilities are designed to not only provide the basic capability to check the operating status of various appliances, but it can even monitor custom software payloads deployed in various appliances across a data center.
By adding the Control Station, Tamres said, system managers can virtually eliminate the time-consuming tasks of upgrading and patching server appliances individually, and instead control hundreds of server appliances from a single location.