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In conjunction with other Building Blocks, IPMI is highlighted as the
systems management technology. "IPMI support should be a checklist
requirement for IT Managers when evaluating server infrastructure".
Other findings includes:
Systems Management Gets Simpler in a Multi-vendor World Aberdeen
research shows that about half the total cost of data center ownership
(TCO) is the labor of the people who operate and administer the systems.
IT management has been increasingly focused on data center labor costs
owing to the recession, server-consolidation projects, and continuing
demands by executive management to "drive costs even lower." Systems
management plays a key role in this business process.
Storage management and virtualization are supported, allowing for
improvements in harnessing the collective power of data center servers and
storage, which leads to greater aggregate capacity utilization.
Aberdeen is excited by the technology improvements represented by DDR2,
IPMI, and PCI Express, among others. Beginning next year, these
technologies will allow industry-standard computers to scale to larger
workloads with higher availability levels at lower TCO. The trend is
definitely in the right direction.
The benefits of IPMI 1.5-based products to IT organizations will be:
- Greater release-level insulation between hardware
and software changes. Newer hardware need not mandate an upgrade to
a newer systems management software release.
- Common user interfaces and procedures for LAN/WAN
and dial-up locations, lowering training costs and reducing the
opportunity for error.
- More comprehensive predictive failure alerts allow
operations to remove a failing server (component) before suffering
downtime. Cluster failover can occur predictably and gracefully.
Self-healing will become more commonplace.
- Because of better failure prediction and
self-healing, system availability at the application level should
improve. With experience, higher availability levels can be factored
into service level agreements.
- Improved auto-provisioning will dramatically lower
labor costs in configuring a new server, a common task among growing
tier-1 server farms and clusters.
- Improved asset tracking reduces the need for
physical inventory labor.
You can download the full Aberdeen Group Report from their website.
You will be required to register prior to downloading.
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