RE: Console replacement strategy

HMC with your own KVM & KVM switch.

The HMC gives you more than a 5250 console session. You can also power
off/on the system, manage LPARs (should they add them eventually), have
it walk you through adding/replacing CIFs (Customer Installed Features
like hard drives, Ethernet cards, RAM), do shared console sessions (so
two or more people can see the same screens), and access the system
firmware/diagnostics. And pretty much everything that can be done
locally can also be accessed remotely via any 5250 emulator for the
console and the WebSM app for everything else. You wouldn't even need
the fancy IP KVM switch for console purposes (although you might still
want it for Windows stuff).

It does cost more and is more complex, but that complexity is masked
pretty nicely behind the GUI. For day-to-day usage you can easily leave
the HMC up with a maximized 5250 console session and ignore the other
features.

It also adds a layer of security as the HMC has it's own user IDs. Rob
& I opened DCRs with IBM and IBM has agreed to add LDAP/Active Directory
support for HMC IDs in the future.

If they add more systems in the future, that one HMC can control up to
16 physical servers. You can also set up multiple HMCs and have them
each support the same systems. We have two systems in two data centers
some 30 miles apart. Each has an HMC that can see & control the other
system. So we now have console redundancy.