Conclusion

ASF-enabled alerting provides a solution in many areas critical to delivering customer support for IT departments. The management capabilities that the IT department delivers through its service level agreements are dependent on several discrete IT tools. A fair portion of these tools, including inventory, remote management and event/fault management are directly delivered by ASF. This makes it a key element in the IT environment both today and in the future.

Ultimately, the goal is to apply Plug and Play principles to the entire IT environment, with available consoles, systems and NICs all supporting the same standard technologies. ASF fundamentally supports the Plug and Play paradigm. The IT administrator ideally should be able to order an Ethernet NIC or LoM (LAN on Motherboard) and automatically get ASF technology along with all the existing Wired for Management baseline technologies – without having to specify it in the order. Toward that end, alerting is now available in all Intel® DT chipsets and all of Intel’s latest generation of network controllers.