Server management standard gaining steam

As organizations move toward running heterogeneous servers as a single pool of resources designed to respond to business needs, a looming issue is how best to manage those disparate systems. The Intelligent Platform Management Interface is a standard that industry observers say is becoming increasingly useful as organizations look for ways to streamline management and cut costs in the data center.

It's not exciting: IPMI deals with monitoring basic server parts such as CPU, fan, voltage and temperature. Analysts say it can help reduce costs by letting administrators remotely manage, diagnose and reboot servers whether the operating system is running or the system has crashed. It does it regardless of platform.

Users might have IPMI running on their servers and not even know it. Today, systems vendors for the most part do not actively promote the standard, although it increasingly is being embedded into servers, storage and other network devices.

"It's amazing how little is known in corporate IT about IPMI," says Ulrich Seif, CIO at National Semiconductor in Santa Clara. "IPMI might be one of the least-known standards in the industry."

IPMI is a message-based hardware management interface that is implemented at the silicon level and uses a baseboard management controller, which is a small processor that sets up IPMI as a subsystem independent of the server's CPU or operating system. It enables remote monitoring, management and recovery capabilities, regardless of the status of the server.

Dell, HP, Intel and NEC are behind the standard, which was created in 1998 to provide an alternative to the proprietary management tools each server manufacturer offers. In the past, IT managers had to use multiple tools to manage heterogeneous systems. About 150 vendors have adopted IPMI, which enables cross-platform management.

IPMI can be exposed through any standard management software interface such as Common Information Model, SNMP and Windows Management Instrumentation. It can feed into higher-level management software such as HP's OpenView.

Industry observers say the latest iteration of the specification might be what finally pushes it onto the radar screen of network executives. IPMI 2.0, unveiled at the Intel Developers Forum earlier this year, is expected to be ratified by its promoters by the middle of next year. It is the third iteration of the specification that took a giant step forward with its last update when it enabled management of servers via the network. To get IPMI capabilities, administrators previously had to be working on the system itself or connecting through a serial port, says Steve Rokov, director of marketing at OSA Technologies, which makes IPMI software and firmware.

"This offered a way to extend accessibility over the LAN," Rokov says. "So administrators could be at the farthest reaches of the enterprise and could still monitor and manage their servers."

But security issues dogged some IT managers who implemented at the specification. IPMI 2.0 addresses security concerns, Rokov says. It supports encryption and requires authentication before allowing access to the baseboard management controller. IPMI 2.0 also supports virtual LANs (VLAN).