Enhanced Dell System Management Tools Streamline IT Operations

As customers look for new ways to leverage their IT investments, the management and maintenance of deployed technology become increasingly important.

To help customers get the most from their investments, Dell has made significant improvements to its portfolio of systems management solutions, adding new capabilities to easily manage physical and virtual IT resources from a single console.  

According to Dell, its system management tools help eliminate many manual and redundant IT tasks while offering customers robust management capabilities through fewer consoles, resulting in significant time savings.

“IT organizations are looking for virtualization management tools that can seamlessly integrate with existing, data center management tools and processes in order to improve operational productivity and coordination,” said Mary Johnston Turner, research director, IDC, in a statement. “Dell's (News - Alert) modular approach to providing physical and virtual management solutions enables customers to align their management investments with the specific needs of their organization,” added Johnston.

New innovations to Dell’s systems management portfolio include Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter, Lifecycle Controller and Embedded Systems Management (News - Alert), and Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller.

With the Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter, customers can provision bare metal servers, deploy hypervisors, handle firmware and BIOS updates, and manage alerts directly from VMware’s vCenter console, said Dell. In addition, unlike competitive offerings that provide primarily link and launch capabilities back to their own proprietary consoles, Dell’s offering integrates server management functionality directly into vCenter and enables customers to work from a single, familiar console, noted Dell.

Likewise, the Lifecycle Controller and Embedded Systems Management tool has enhanced its embedded systems management capabilities, making it even faster for users to perform key operational tasks, including system deployment, system updates, workload migration, and hardware monitoring and remediation. Reducing time and steps not only streamlines operational tasks, but also reduces potential for error and thus enhances system uptime, asserted Dell.

Furthermore, with the latest integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC) users get remote management and configuration options, which reduces or eliminates the need for administrators to visit the server — even when the server is not operational. iDRAC enables “anytime, anywhere” remote management, monitoring, troubleshooting, remediation, and server upgrades, independent of the OS status, according to Dell.

In a statement, Paul Redpath, managing director, Catalyst2, said, “Using Lifecycle Controller, it takes us just five minutes to upgrade firmware on a server. The iDRAC is great because it lets us troubleshoot and upgrade software in our London data center from our office in Edinburgh. Tasks such as mounting a CD can be completed in two minutes as opposed to several hours if an employee had to be present onsite.”