linux blades, serial access

Conservers,

While we are on the topic of linux consoles, in particular blade servers,
that is, a chassis stuffed full of individual blades hosting a cpu (or
two), disk, etc.

The group managing the blade setup claims that the only way to access the
'console' is through a web browser/java applet. This is quite cumbersome,
slow, and requires a GUI environment.  And worse yet, cant integrate into
conserver :) Is there not a serial-like console access available to access
the individual consoles of each blade?  Realizing they are all virtualized
with in the blade chassis, the implementation is probably vendor
dependent.

It seems draconian to force a admin to access a simple tty environment
through a slow and cumbersome GUI. 

Maybe what I'm looking for is a the telnet / ssh environment to access the
blade chassis controller? 

At present, we are using HP's blade centers.

thanks,
-dolan