Feb 11, 2009 : Atlantic Metro Adds Mobile Reboot Tool

📅 February 11, 2009 - Colocation provider Atlantic Metro Communications (atlanticmetro.net -> 365datacenters.com) announced in a posting to its blog Tuesday that it has added a mobile interface to its remote infrastructure management system, including the power to reboot a device from a mobile phone.

The post includes a basic case for the remote management of infrastructure hosted in a colocation facility.

"In times of crisis or downtime, your customers or colleagues are forced to suffer while you communicate the actions necessary to restore service to whomever is on-site. This can result in a waste of time, both personal and company, but more so a waste of the precious uptime you strive so much to maintain."

Atlantic Metro says its remote management system has been a big part of its offering for a while. Its customer panel includes an extensive "Device Manager" section, which makes it possible for customers to "track the geographic specifics of devices such as device name, data center address, suite, cage, rack, and rack unit."

It also provides device-level details about such components as CPU, memory, hard drive, bandwidth and power. Possibly most importantly, the system offers the ability for customers to power any device on or off, or reboot.

"While we're not a big fan of blindly rebooting systems without investigation, sometimes its really the thing that needs to be done," says the blog post, "especially while your colleagues are unavailable and you're stuck at that sporting event with nothing more than your mobile device.'

Here, the post introduces the MobileMY control panel (so named, it would seem, because the customer control panel sub-domain reads as "my Atlantic Metro"). A stripped-down version of the customer panel that provides access to a subset of its features, the mobile control panel is currently testing on Blackberry Curve, Storm, Bold and Pearl, as well as on iPhone and iPod Touch.

"From this interface, you can determine the physical location of the devices bound to your Atlantic Metro account, and reboot any device," says the post. "Future features include real-time bandwidth utilization graphs, real-time server CPU, Memory and Disk utilization statistics and graphs, real-time network monitoring status (PING/TCP/UDP/Custom Scripts). We're working on it!"

Not precisely related, but certainly of note is the fact that Atlantic Metro is one of the sponsors of our WHR Networking Event this very evening in San Francisco - in case you'd like some real-world follow-up to this story.