Network closets are small, hot, unsupervised, and hard to manage. They were never expected to provide the highest level of availability. And they certainly were never intended to house today’s high-powered networking devices. But as mission-critical applications get pushed to the “edge of the network,” businesses now demand traditional telco levels of reliability from these remote, unmanned locations.

 

With the increased “critically” of the equipment in network closets, keeping an eye on things from afar is now both more challenging and more necessary. Small unknown issues can  quickly escalate to big problems. Today’s network closets experience more frequent power problems that lead to outages and interruptions. The thermal loads of today’s high-density equipment usually overheats the room- and as temperature soar, devices fall. The combination of distributed resources and unmanned space makes monitoring and managing network closets difficult. Physical threats, whether intruders or environmental conditions, threaten downtime.