According to AAA, an estimated 46.9 million people traveled for Thanksgiving. Transportation systems help secure and move these travelers to their destination amidst heightened security concerns, road construction and unpredictable weather patterns. How these systems operate does not concern people so much except when they stopped working.
Recently, for example, worldwide headlines trumpeted the computer glitch that brought a major U.S. airline to a dead halt. With the upcoming Christmas holiday season, transportation operators like you cannot afford the risk to travelers, the lost revenue or the bad publicity that comes with service disruptions.
To keep a transportation system moving, your operations personnel need to rapidly access, view, and aggregate data maintained in multiple operational systems. This data also needs to be delivered in many formats, such as video feeds, teleconferencing sessions, maps, and more. And your control rooms have to operate efficiently, ensure systems are running smoothly and keep costs under control.
Key technologies that can help control rooms operate at peak performance:
High-performance KVM systems - offers a quick and simple way to provide access to an unlimited number of operational systems. Using the right KVM technology, you can securely switch between these systems in seconds from their workstations. Both local and remote users can shift instantly between systems to share screens, sessions and data.
Avocent KVM switches have remote extension capabilities that allow systems and peripherals to be back-racked in a separate location. To ensure a high-fidelity experience, these KVM switches are designed to provide pixel-perfect quality with no latency.
To illustrate, a major international airport decided to consolidate five control rooms into a single command and control center. Using KVM switches, the airport consolidated 29 dispersed departments into one centralized control room, and users can now share desk information with video walls in real time, for smooth distribution of information and incident knowledge transfer. KVMs have also helped the airport increase resilience simply by swapping out transmitter and receiver units, users are back online instantly and with no single point of failure. The airport has taken advantage of the remote capabilities as well, securely back-racking all systems in a communications room.
Centralized Remote Management - simplifies the job of IT management by enabling automatic location, connection and administration of systems from a single console. Avocent's centralized remote management systems enables real-time status information and instant diagnostics, giving the IT administrators the tools to diagnose problems and forestall downtime.
Using KVMs to share systems is a great way to reduce costs as well. Not only can your users perform their daily tasks more efficiently, but the number of primary and active standby systems needed to support operations can be reduced. This can add up to significant capital cost savings and even eliminate the need to build multiple control rooms.
Download reviews of Vertiv solutions for transportation control rooms. If you've decided that KVM switches and remote centralized management are right for your control room, contact us to assist in creating an operating environment that matches your business requirements.
