Out-of-band management facilitates centralized control and repair of local and especially remote IT infrastructure devices such as servers, network routers or environmental sensors. The OOB market has been growing as an isolated IT management niche for many years to reach an estimated revenue of $1.12 billion last year. Even prior to the recently skyrocketing energy costs and renewed shortages of appropriately skilled IT personnel, the remote control and repair capability drove the OOB market to experience a healthy double-digit average compound annual growth rate (CAGR). In a very active "branch office" segment, the OOB market CAGR is on the order of 30%. OOB users swear by the ease of deployment, the efficient convenience of remote device repair, and rapid ROI even when based solely on avoidance of "truck rolls."

Although core OOB technologies such as keyboard, video, and mouse (KVM) or Serial Console servers have reached a state of maturity, vendors, such as Avocent, Aten, Lantronix, MRV, and Raritan, are applying it in an evolutionary way for achieving greater control, resiliency and cost efficiency by a growing level of integration with more pervasive in-band technologies. Several primary forces drive the necessity for closer collaboration between the OOB and in-band management:

* The growth in application and other content "living" on the network.
* A constantly increasing geographical area of business operations (organizational and geographic sprawl).
* The skyrocketing functional density of IT infrastructure devices.

These primary forces lead to many evolving IT management requirements and an inescapable conclusion that without a growing collaboration between OOB and in-band, effective IT management will not be possible in the future.

To use an analogy, in-band IT management can be compared to human eyesight. It can detect the impending danger but cannot do anything about it. Similarly, OOB can be compared to human limbs that can "hit the break pedal" in a car but are not able to efficiently recognize the impending danger. Many of us experienced a car accident with compete recognition that it will occur because it was too late for an avoidance maneuver. Without a growing collaboration between in-band and OOB, management of IT infrastructures in the future will experience exponentially increasing occurrences of service wreckage caused by these "too-little-too-late" accidents. From a business point of view, this is an unacceptable risk.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.