Buyers' Guide
Problems ease for managing multi-vendor fleets
Published: 20 Aug 2008, 12:10pm
CIOs can see the benefits of dealing with a single vendor. But they are equally loath to become locked into one supplier. Now important developments in management standards could solve that conundrum.
IT managers are rightly wary of any technology that limits their hardware and software choices. They would rather be multi-vendor, and if a great feature is only available on a limited set of machines, they may hesitate to use it.
Although defined by Intel and only available on Intel systems, vPro motherboard technology is actually a leading part of a global move to manage multi-vendor environments and in itself a major step towards managing heterogeneous PC fleets.
On one level, that is obvious. Intel-based systems are available from a vast number of vendors from Fujitsu Siemens to HP, so vPro can be used to manage multi-vendor fleets right now.
But there is more to it than that - and it all depends on a standard called Dash.
DMTF and Dash
Intel is a prominent member of the industry body that works on this field - the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) - and is closely involved in its effort to create a Desktop and mobile Architecture for System Hardware (Dash).
Intel is contributing to Dash, which builds on work such as Wake-on-LAN, and Intel's Active Management Technology (AMT) will be Dash-compliant. "But Dash does not give you everything," says Stuart Dommett, enterprise client product manager at Intel. "It's just a set of standards and it is not completed yet."
The latest specification, Dash 1.1, finished at the end of 2007, adds new features, such as managing USB drives. Overall, it uses web services and defines architectural semantics, industry standard protocols, and a set of profiles that will in principle standardise secure management of systems regardless of the operating system they use, or the vendor who made them.
At the moment, Intel already has a complete desktop management function based on vPro and its AMT component. Dash, as Dommett points out, is still being implemented by the other vendors. "We have to see whether the first iteration of Dash will be attractive to a lot of customers. We have to see how successful it will be," he says.
Extra features in AMT
It's clear that AMT includes some extra features that are not yet in the standards-based Dash approach. That is usually the case in any field, where a given vendor's products will extend and develop industry standards, often creating technologies that can be used to help guide the development of the standard in future.
Notably, AMT has agent presence, remote configuration and the System Defense filters.
Organisations with a mixed fleet of PCs can use AMT to support the management of their vPro-capable PCs. As Dash systems emerge, they will be able to use many of the same functions on their non-Intel or Pentium PCs.
But non-vPro systems will require more manual intervention. "AMT is only carried within Intel chipsets," says Dommett. "That's how we differentiate the product." Users who want to comply with Dash will be able to limit the features they use in AMT, while others will adopt all of AMT to get the most benefit.
"It's not about catch-up," says Dommett. It's just natural that a company can create more complete solutions for its own systems - and can then give the industry the benefit of its knowledge and experience. "We'd already gone to standards groups before bringing out AMT," says Dommett. "We think it's what's needed in the IT industry."
Analysts' views on Dash
Analysts broadly agree with him. "vPro is a superset of Dash functionality," says Gartner analyst Stephen Kleynhans, quoted in GCN.
"There are some additional things you can you can do [with] vPro that you couldn't do with a pure Dash implementation. For the most part, the broadest features - the ones most people are actually implementing and using - they are pretty much open. I don't think there is a significant lock-in concern."
Gartner has pointed out that Dash is a framework, rather than a specific set of standards. "The framework establishes management elements such as hardware reporting, behaviour of applications and out-of-band management controls," says a Gartner report.
"As a framework, rather than a standard, the actual tool implementation and management interfaces may vary from vendor to vendor. In this light, vPro is effectively Intel's implementation of Dash."
Out-of-band management
The presence of Dash reassures Gartner, which had warned users in early 2006 that vPro was proprietary and could limit their hardware choices. Now, it is happy to recommend users adopt it - indeed, Gartner suggests that vPro is the most common implementation, and most likely the best basis for a strategic move towards Dash.
In the long term, by fostering standards, Dash could provide a way to have out-of-band management agents on PCs from many vendors, as well as making sure they report faults and behaviour problems the same way.
In the medium term some of the features in remote management will be exclusively available on Intel systems but, as Gartner points out these are "broadly available from all the major PC hardware OEMs."
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