with New Tools to Improve Interoperability
- Open source tools decrease development time and enable
interoperability of essential client management solutions-
SUNNYVALE, Calif. - April 30, 2008 - AMD (NYSE:AMD) today announced a
further step in its commitment to promote open industry standards for
client management solutions with new open source tools designed to
accelerate adoption of the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF)
Desktop and Mobile Architecture for System Hardware (DASH) standard.
AMD collaborated with Raritan, a leading provider of IT management
solutions, to assist hardware, firmware and console vendors in bringing
DASH solutions to market as quickly as possible by delivering a DASH
software development kit (SDK) and reference implementation. Products
developed with these tools are designed to reduce the cost of managing
desktop and notebook clients for businesses by decreasing development
time and improving interoperability, allowing faster time-to-market and
higher quality management products.
Building on the momentum from the recently announced AMD Business Class
initiative, this relationship expands AMD's efforts to offer solutions
with features and interoperability businesses need, and expands AMD's
strategy to leverage an open standards-based approach to implementing
security, virtualization and manageability features in successive
generations of Business Class technology.
"AMD believes that open standards-based client technologies provide our
customers with manageability features necessary to easily and flexibly
support today's dynamic IT environments, while reducing cost and
complexity," said Earl Stahl, vice president, Software Development, AMD.
"We are pleased to have Raritan's support and remote management and
subsystems expertise and to work with the open standards community in
advancing remote management capabilities and management
interoperability."
As a board member of the DMTF and a major contributor to the DASH
specification, AMD is committed to standards that support choice in the
marketplace and today's increasingly diverse IT environments, rather
than locking businesses into expensive, proprietary technology. Raritan,
also a leadership member of the DMTF, has collaborated with AMD on
delivering other standards specifications and solutions, such as OPMA
(Open Platform Management Architecture)-a common connector interface
standard for system management cards.
"Raritan is pleased to work with AMD and the open source community to
offer alternatives to proprietary management solutions," said Christian
Paetz, director, Product Management Emerging Markets, Raritan. "The new
DASH tools will enable companies of all sizes to deliver innovative
third-party solutions. As a result, multi-vendor systems may be enabled
to be accessed remotely and important systems management information,
such as system health and power consumption, would be able to be
exchanged seamlessly across entire IT infrastructures. Customers can
benefit by being able to manage diverse IT environments more
efficiently, so that they can better respond to business needs."
At the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) this week in Las Vegas, AMD and
Raritan, together with others technology partners, will showcase these
tools and demonstrate the DASH software development kit supporting
support the Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager in AMD booth
#212. Also in the AMD booth, Marvell will demonstrate its DASH
solution, using systems based on AMD Business Class technology:
"Marvell is excited to continue working with AMD on our standards-based
solution, which is designed to make interoperable, out-of-band
manageability a mainstay in the PC client environment," said Dr. Roawen
Chen, Vice President and General Manager of the Connectivity Business
Unit, Communications and Consumer Business Group at Marvell. "Our DASH
solution and continued focus to ensure our solutions interoperate with
key management tools like Microsoft's System Center Configuration
Manager, exemplifies our continued commitment to remote manageability
enablement."
DASH Software Developers Kit
AMD and Raritan designed the DASH console SDK to accelerate support for
DASH in management consoles and tools. For ease-of-use, this tool
exposes various APIs, giving management console developers and vendors a
way to quickly add DASH support to their products without having to
learn the details of the DASH specification. To make using DASH as
simple as possible, the SDK also includes APIs to standard scripting
languages like Python. Likewise, IT administrators can use familiar
languages to write scripts for DASH-enabled clients.
DASH Software Reference Implementation
In addition, AMD and Raritan are also developing a DASH software
reference implementation. This technology will be designed to simulate a
DASH-enabled client, allowing developers to test management consoles and
applications against the DASH software reference implementation for
interoperability. The use of a management access point (MAP) should give
developers a DASH-enabled test target for their management applications.
Vendors who develop MAPs can also refer to the implementation for useful
examples of how to implement different features of the DASH standard.
The reference implementation is planned to be easy to deploy, making it
simple to test and demonstrate a DASH-enabled management console's
capabilities.
DASH Interoperability Test Suite
With the DASH interoperability test suite, available since March 2007,
AMD, Raritan, and other industry vendors deliver on the core principal
of the DASH standard by providing tests that help evaluate the
interoperability DASH-based solutions. OEMs, component, and firmware
developers can utilize these open source tests to check their DASH
implementations for interoperability. In terms of real-world needs, IT
administrators can use these open source tools to test different
DASH-enabled components for interoperability in their environments
before making a purchasing decision.
About AMD
Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD) is a leading global provider of
innovative processing solutions in the computing, graphics and consumer
electronics markets. AMD is dedicated to driving open innovation, choice
and industry growth by delivering superior customer-centric solutions
that empower consumers and businesses worldwide.