Serial consoles don't help if the box is properly wedged, or has eaten its own bootloader. With a good out of band management system, you can install an OS remo

Serial consoles don't help if the box is properly wedged, or has eaten its own bootloader. With a good out of band management system, you can install an OS remotely, with disks on the session driving it appearing as local disks to the machine. Or, you can power off a box as needed, power it on, reconfigure raid cards, etc. A remote serial console is very limited in comparison.