Avocent VPI Building Blocks

Avocent Corporation has announced the release of a building block architecture for remote server management. Virtual Presence Infrastructure (VPI) brings together the embedded worlds of Out-of-Band (OOB), IPMI, KVM and other Active Management Technologies into a manageability platform. Vendors can select specific building blocks or the entire VPI suite based on their design requirements.

Avocent delivers VPI through an aggregation of KVM on silicon, IPMI firmware and management gateways. Available worldwide, customers that have licensed Avocent VPI building blocks include Dell, IBM and Intel. Pricing varies by configuration. The vendor states that additional products will be released during 2005.

VPI is delivered as system independent and agentless remote management services that offer hardware-level health monitoring and access control. It is implemented as an autonomous, systems monitoring/control interface, and also supports the entire system lifecycle--Pre-OS, Boot, OS loading, OS running, OS unresponsive--offering both text and graphical console access.

Interoperability levels are achieved by supporting IPMI 2.0, Virtual Media and the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) CIM (Common Information Model) and SMASH (Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware) initiatives.