Introduction

With IT organizations facing increasing pressure to manage more systems with fewer resources, they are forced to re-examine their tools and procedures. Suppliers to the IT community are also impacted – they need to identify how they can differentiate their products and add value for their end customers by making systems management cheaper and easier. As a result, Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) initiatives have received significant focus in the market place. Alerting technology in general and ASF specifically is well suited to contribute to the manageability problem. So, what is the Alerting Standards Forum (ASF) and why is its alerting technology different?

While many network management solutions have been available and deployed for many years, a standards-based approach which provides functionality in the low power and OS absent state has not been available. Typically, software-based management solutions require a healthy OS and application to function. Ironically, when the IT manager most needs to retain access to a remote system for diagnosis and recovery, the OS or an application is most likely to be unavailable or unstable. ASF is designed to address this problem.

ASF is a standards-based alerting technology that enables the IT administrator to manage network nodes without regard to the OS state. ASF not only provides remote alerting of key environmental events such as temperature, electrical, fan, and chassis-intrusion that are detected by sensors, it also provides system status using system heartbeats. These same environmental events and system status events can be monitored in the operating-system-absent environment. ASF also monitors failure-to-boot indications. When an event occurs, a Platform Event Trap (PET) is sent to the management console. Management consoles provide remote control functionality that allows the administrator to take corrective actions based on the alerts. Intel provides a management console Software Development Kit (SDK) to help console vendors add ASF support. The SDK includes the ability to generate Remote Control Commands and generate ASF V2.0 key pairs.

However, without the ability to be deployed and configured by industry standard tools, the effort required to install and configure any ASF solution in an enterprise environment would exceed the benefits of the solution itself. This paper explores Intel’s ASF solution and how its deployment model is ideally suited to work well with industry standard tools and Microsoft* IntelliMirror* management technologies to increase the availability and reduce the overall cost of supporting Windows users.

Mircosoft Intellimirror management technologies use policy-based Change and Configuration management to enable users’ data, software and settings to follow them in a distributed computing environment¹. While an Intel ASF solution need not require all of the Microsoft Intellimirror management technologies, they do provide an excellent backdrop for the technology and tools that the Intel ASF solution does support.