KVM technology is a must-have for any IT organization, large or small, that needs to ensure the health of its computing infrastructure within tight staff resource constraints. With KVM, IT staff can instantly take control of devices anywhere at any time in order to solve problems, perform essential management tasks, and respond to changing business requirements. KVM thus helps companies compete more effectively in a world where success is increasingly contingent upon IT excellence – and where the growth of computing infrastructure typically outpaces the ability to hire more people to manage that infrastructure.

There are several factors that differentiate one KVM solution from another – which means that there are several factors that IT decision-makers should consider when selecting a KVM solution. These factors include a KVM solution’s various features and functionality, its bandwidth requirements, the device configurations available from the vendor, and pricing.

One factor in particular, however, is often overlooked by KVM buyers: the user experience. This is, in part, because buyers tend to not have a lot of time to "play" with multiple KVM solutions before making a buying decision in order to compare the user experience they each offer. Assessment of the quality of any given solution’s user experience may also be perceived as a subjective matter – at least when contrasted with attributes that are easily quantified, such as cost or bandwidth requirements.

In addition, many KVM buyers unfortunately neglect to give user experience adequate consideration in their purchasing decisions because they simply underestimate its importance in ensuring that investments in KVM technology yield maximum business value over the long term.

This can be a costly mistake. Empirical evidence from real-world deployments clearly demonstrates that user experience is an absolutely critical factor in determining the long-term value of a KVM solution. IT staff have to use these solutions day in and day out to do their jobs. Usability issues that adversely impact staff productivity undermine the very purpose for which KVM solutions are acquired in the first place. KVM buyers must therefore carefully consider a full range of user experience factors in making their KVM purchasing decisions.

This white paper outlines the specific attributes of the user experience that KVM buyers should consider when choosing a solution – and how those attributes impact the long-term business value provided by the solution. This paper also describes how Adder’s KVM solutions provide a substantially differentiated user experience in order to deliver substantially differentiated business value.

By fully factoring this differentiated user experience into their purchasing decisions, KVM buyers can greatly boost the effectiveness and efficiency of their IT organizations – which, in turn, will provide them with competitive advantages in today’s highly computing-dependent business environment.

The term "user experience" may, at first glance, strike certain readers as a somewhat fuzzy and secondary issue. After all, it’s typically much easier to evaluate the features, interoperability, and price of an IT solution than it is to evaluate the quality of the user experience that it provides. Features, interoperability, and price may also be considered by some to offer "hard" benefits, while a differentiated user experience may be viewed as only offering "soft" ones.

But this is not the case at all when it comes to KVM technology. The KVM user experience is actually integral to its business value, because it affects how over-tasked, under-resourced IT staff get their jobs done every minute of every day. The KVM user experience is also comprised of several very concrete, readily observable attributes – all of which contribute to the total value that a KVM solution delivers to the business over the long term.

These concrete, readily observable attributes include:

It’s hard to manage what you can’t quite see. This is what makes video quality so critical for KVM users. An overly sensitive video signal can create "screen noise" that obscures the actual screen content of the managed device. An under-performing video signal, on the other hand, can keep screens from being updated quickly enough.

KVM users also have to be able to effectively manage their screen "real estate." If the screen of the device they’re managing is larger than the screen of the desktop or laptop they’re using, for example, they need to scale it appropriately so that that they don’t have to keep scrolling around the window. The proliferation of screens with different aspect ratios is making this more of an issue than ever.

If their on-screen cursor fails to respond well to the movements of a mouse or laptop pointing device, KVM users wind up working much more slowly. This is because their whole natural rhythm of pointing, clicking, dragging, dropping, and selecting menu items gets thrown off. KVM users therefore need mouse response that is nearly instantaneous.

Mouse response can actually be measured fairly accurately by simply moving the mouse in a circle at the rate of about one full circle per second. The number of degrees that the cursor lags behind the actual motion is a good indicator of responsiveness. A good response is in the neighborhood of five or ten degrees of lag. A poor response may reach 180 degrees or more.

Appropriate calibration of mouse acceleration can be another key issue. Different operating systems handle acceleration in different ways. If a KVM solution can’t properly support mouse acceleration, KVM administrators may have to manually revert to non-accelerated mode – which again encumbers users, in addition to creating additional management overhead.

The KVM user experience is affected by more than just video quality and mouse response. For example, KVM users must be able to quickly select the device they need to manage from a simple scroll-down list. Once they select a device, they should be able to get to work right away without having to perform any additional actions.

KVM users can also be impeded by the need to "toggle" between the screen of the managed device and the menus for the KVM software itself.

In addition, KVM users need fast, easy access to all the remote management features they require to effectively manage target devices. So they should be able to perform "virtual media" operations (i.e. the use of local media as though it were connected to the managed device), power cycling, and other tasks in a simple, intuitive, and consistent manner.

The quality of the KVM user experience is also affected by everything users have to do before they can actually take control of a remote machine. With KVM-over-IP, for example, users may have to jump through hoops to locally configure the IP address of the managed device so that it can be available to the KVM-over-IP system. In some cases, a user may have to find a PC with a serial port and bring it to the managed device. In other cases, a user may even have to create a special LAN just for this purpose. And, of course, if something goes wrong with this process, access to the device can be lost entirely.

In addition, as a wider range of devices are managed via KVM, it can become more difficult to keep track of all the different mouse and video settings – forcing users to spend their time looking for previous settings or having to start their setups from scratch. Optimally, a KVM solution should therefore insulate administrators from these headaches. It should also make it easy for administrators to grant various types of permissions to various users.

The above overview makes it abundantly clear that the KVM user experience is not a vague or abstract concept. It is the aggregation of numerous readily observable aspects of a KVM solution’s performance and design. The next question, then, is how this readily observable experience relates to business value.

Businesses at the start of the third millennium face a serious conundrum. On one hand, their day-to-day bottom-line performance is becoming increasingly dependent on the smooth operation of their constantly growing IT environments. On the other hand, budget constraints severely limit – and may even be reducing – the human resource they can allocate to the management of those environments.

In other words, effective and efficient IT management isn’t just something that can save a few dollars here or improve customer satisfaction there. It is an absolutely core requirement for business growth, profitability, and competitive viability.

Therefore, to the extent that the KVM user experience impacts the effectiveness and efficiency of IT management, it also impacts the bottom-line performance of the business.

There are actually several ways in which the KVM user experience impacts the effectiveness and efficiency of IT management. These include:

This is essential as IT infrastructure grows while staffing remains flat or actually decreases. KVM users who can accomplish tasks quickly and with a high degree of confidence will simply be more productive than those who cannot. The cost savings that result from this increased productivity can be substantial. A problematic KVM user experience, on the other hand, results in users more frequently getting up from their desks and going to the managed devices to perform required tasks. This reduces productivity and undermines the whole purpose of using KVM technology.

To compete and grow in the information economy, businesses constantly need to deploy more IT infrastructure. However, as the cost of infrastructure components such as servers and storage goes down, the limiting factor for infrastructure growth today often turns out to be the availability of people to manage these components – rather than the actual capital cost of acquiring them. By enabling fewer people to manage more components, a quality KVM user experience helps remove this impediment to infrastructure growth.

A quality user experience enables KVM users to more quickly and confidently fix problems. It also empowers them to more adeptly perform the preventative maintenance tasks required to avoid problems. This results in reduced IT systems downtime – which, in turn, results in reduced business interruption. The benefits of this reduced business interruption include avoidance of lost employee productivity, greater customer satisfaction, and higher sales revenue.

KVM technology does more than just empower IT staff to manage devices remotely. It also supports security best practices by enabling tighter control of physical and remote access to IT infrastructure. And it supports compliance by providing a single, auditable channel-of-control for all IT systems. By encouraging the consistent use of KVM to perform all infrastructure management functions, a quality KVM user experience helps business reap these secondary – but vital – benefits. A problematic KVM user experience, in marked contrast, can rapidly eradicate these benefits even if it only causes users to occasionally go the hands-on route. After all, it only takes the entry of a single unauthorized person into a data center to violate both security and compliance mandates.

All of this underscores the fact that a premium KVM user experience isn’t something that companies may opt for merely to improve the morale of a few users or save a few person-hours of IT staff time. By having a significant impact on how IT does its job, a premium KVM user experience can have a significant financial impact on the overall performance of the business. This makes the KVM user experience worthy of serious consideration by KVM technology decision-makers.

With IT budgets being so tight, it isn’t uncommon for IT decision-makers to give inordinate weight to the upfront acquisition costs of any technology solution that they may consider purchasing. But, in the case of KVM, this short-term thinking can be especially dangerous. The greatest cost of any KVM implementation over its entire lifecycle is the labor cost of the IT professionals who use it. And the long-term value of any KVM solution is measured by how well it enables those professionals to achieve their objective, day in and day out.

Based on these realities, the quality of the user experience should always be a primary criteria for selecting a KVM solution – because, other things being equal, a premium user experience will dramatically boost the long-term economic value returned by any KVM investment.