The Promise of Systems Management

IT managers have a dream: they want to reduce the time and money spent on routine “help desk” inquiries, enabling them to spend more time on higher level tasks and strategic planning. They want to look at the big picture – developing and providing different classes of user services instead of just putting out fires. Software management solutions, available since the 1990s, promise to bring this dream closer to reality while also ensuring maximum end-user system uptime.

These solutions give the IT manager remote access to local computing systems and provide regular health and inventory data for the remote user systems. Management console applications focused on this level of systems management facilitate tasks ranging from inventory, maintenance and troubleshooting to more complex debugging capabilities.

With such management tools, enterprise IT departments should be able to reduce the number of on-site visits to distant systems, resulting in a corresponding decrease in support staff costs and system TCO. However, a barrier to fully realizing these benefits has been the inability of these software-based solutions to provide remote management in low-power and OS-absent states such as:

· System sleeping

· System powered off

· Operating System (OS) hung

· Booting up

Previous technologies have not provided a complete solution. For example, Wake on LAN (WoL) technology is designed to bring remote systems out of sleep mode for off-hours maintenance and then allow them to go back to sleep until regular work hours. But WoL doesn’t work when the OS is hung. In fact, a problem with software-based management in general is that it depends on a healthy OS and application to keep working. When the OS or application becomes unavailable or unstable, that is when the IT manager most needs to retain access to the remote system for diagnosis and recovery. Ironically, that is precisely when the remote management solution is least likely to deliver the needed access. The Alert Standard Format specification addresses this gap.

ASF provides the missing piece of standards-based alerting and remote control, which can be implemented on mobile, desktop and workstation systems, or server platforms. Both the “send” (alerting) and “receive” (remote control) capabilities of the ASF technology are hardware-based and local to the networking solution on managed systems. This allows these solutions true CPU and OS independence, providing a much more persistent connection with the management console.