Basically all modern storage arrays and network devices rely on serial connections for first time setup. There are some advantages to this approach for the dat

Basically all modern storage arrays and network devices rely on serial connections for first time setup. There are some advantages to this approach for the datacenter engineer if you aren't trying to do it at scale (where you'd likely be leveraging PXE). Once you have the speed and parity sorted out (often a pain), it's easy to copy/paste into a serial terminal which can make stuffing large configs into a new device relatively painless. Alternately, one can sometimes navigate through a simple menu system to configure IP addressing to complete initial config through some other means (SSH/HTTPS/etc). Anyone supporting network gear in a datacenter has a baby blue Cisco serial cable somewhere in their bag.