IT organizations face increasing complexity and costs associated with operating multiple server platforms across diverse departments, sites and locations. With important initiatives such as grid and utility computing underway at many organizations, server management continues to be central to controlling costs in data centers - it is the building block on which successful management is built. As a result, standards that focus on server management are increasingly critical.

Until now there have been no cross-platform standards that let network administrators directly manage servers from multiple vendors. This led hardware manufacturers to develop varied tool sets to manage in-band and out-of-band traffic for different operating systems and system states. Today's multi-vendor data centers contain an inefficient array of management commands and tools.

To address this, the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) recently announced details of its Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware suite, including the SMASH Command Line Protocol (CLP) specification. SMASH CLP enables simple and intuitive management of heterogeneous servers in data centers independent of machine state, operating system state, server system topology or access method.

Building on the DMTF's Common Information Model schema, SMASH CLP provides a "lightweight" command-line syntax; it lets different vendors' systems be represented in similar ways. Server vendors' products, including stand-alone servers, blades, racks and partitions, will be able to support SMASH CLP commands. With these SMASH CLP-enabled products, users on a management station or a client will be able to execute common operations - such as system power on and off, system log display, boot order configuration and text-based remote console - using the same commands across disparate vendor platforms.

SMASH CLP is a command/response specification (executed by a user or in an automated fashion by a script) transmitted and received over a text message-based transport protocol. The SMASH CLP syntax is explicitly defined, with selectable formats. Options include free-form text, comma form text, comma-separated, keyword=value and XML. In this simple interface, users navigate a directory-like hierarchy of command targets.