Lights-out quite literally means that there are a bare minimum or no personnel to carry out critical jobs within a data center. Thus you may have people from India or elsewhere manning the web server of a data center located in the USA. While it may bring in huge savings as far as costs are concerned, the decision that a data center manager has to take is if such a move is feasible.

It’s not just building a data center that is expensive. Huge costs are invested in manpower for all areas of running a data center – IT operations, security personnel and facilities staff to name just a few. The trade off needs to occur between all these groups of people. Security of data is a huge factor and therefore there can be virtually no compromise here. IT staff however, can be streamlined simply because technology and machinery can be manipulated from far off too.

Tasks such as cabling, provision and racking require a person to be on site but almost everything else can be controlled from a laptop anywhere thanks to the magic of technology.

There are mega savings in costs to be had with remote management. A data center manager will only need to look at virtual hosts in the rack, efficient security personnel and a great location for his data center. Then with remote management handling the data center, all he has to do is sit back and watch the costs nose-diving. Also, there may be an advantage in limiting accessibility when a data center has lesser people with physical access to a computer room and therefore lesser possibility of accidents and security breaches. This style of remote management could also boost response time with remote bios level access to a data center’s servers. Geographical independence can also be achieved through this system.

While this scenario may conjure up visions of a data center functioning with bare minimum personnel costs, here is a word of caution.

On-site staff may not be one hundred percent dispensable. A data center will need people within its premises too to fire fight something going wrong like outages. Also, a data center manager may not find someone with the required amount of experience and expertise to fend off crisis when it happens. 

Some examples of this LOM or Lights Out Management are HP’s iLO and Sun’s ALOM.

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