AMD Collaborates with Raritan to Promote Client Manageability Standards with New Tools to Improve Interoperability

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -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.