Intel Corp., Dell Inc., IBM Corp., and Hewlett-Packard Co. on Monday announced plans to jointly work with an industry organization
to standardize the way servers are managed, the companies announced Monday.
The four companies will lead a new working group, called the Server Management Working Group, being formed within the Distributed
Management Task Force, Inc. (DMTF) standards organization. It will define interfaces for the discovery, configuration and
management of servers on a network, said Chad Engelgau, the senior manager responsible for server manageability planning at
Dell.
The new interfaces will make it easier for independent software vendors and system administrators to write software that works
with a variety of hardware, said Engelgau. "With this new standard, information is going to be exposed in an industry standards
way so that any third party is going to be able to access that information," he said.
The Server Management Working Group plans to develop these standards in a specification called the Command Line Interface
(CLI), a draft of which is expected to be delivered in by July 1, 2004, according to a DMTF statement.
The effort is also being supported by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc., the statement said.
The four companies leading the Server Management Working Group have been discussing ways of standardizing server components
for several months now. Monday's announcement represents a first tentative step in that direction according to Gordon Haff,
an analyst with the Illuminata Inc. research firm in Nashua, New Hampshire.
Speaking at the Oracle Open World conference in September, Dell Chief Executive Officer Michael Dell said his company was
"in discussions with some fairly large computer companies to get some agreement on a standard blade architecture."
At the time, the discussions included standards for common software APIs (application programming interfaces), hardware interconnects
and form factors for high-density servers, like blades.
While Monday's announcement seemed to cover similar ground to the effort referred to by Michael Dell, it was not the result
of those discussions, said Dell spokeswoman Carmen Maverick.
Dell had no comment on whether discussions to define a blade standard were ongoing, but Intel, one of Dell's partner's in
today's announcement, would not support such an effort, according to Nim Homayoun, a strategic planning manager with Intel.
"We don't believe in standardizing the form factor of blades," he said.
Standardization of server management tools is important but a common blade form factor would not necessarily be a good idea
at this time, said Haff. "There really are a lot of different potential design points for a blade server," he said. "You couple
that with the fact that (blade technology) is so new and people are still figuring out ways to work that, and it seems to
me that you'd possibly be restricting different approaches early in the game."
The first meeting of the new DMTF group will be held in Dallas, on Wednesday and Thursday of this week.
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