With constantly changing business needs and static budgets, IT departments are being challenged to deliver IT services faster and at a lower cost. The need for flexibility and choice in adopting new technologies in order to remain relevant in today’s competitive markets is more important than ever.
When adopting new technologies, one of the biggest barriers for IT teams is figuring out how to continue to derive value from existing IT infrastructure investments, which are often heterogeneous and costly to manage.
In a recent blog post, Marius Haas, Chief Commercial Officer and president, Dell Enterprise Solutions, talked about how “organizations need a way to bridge between current infrastructure and future investments in order to connect, innovate and grow.” Unified management and automation are crucial for bridging that gap and increasing data center efficiency.
Future-Ready Automation
Dell Active System Manager (ASM) is Dell’s unified management and open automation solution that integrates with the IT of today and tomorrow. With its open, flexible and extensible architecture, and support for heterogeneous IT environments, Active System Manager empowers IT teams to unify existing IT investments and maintain the flexibility to adopt new technology to support new business initiatives in the future.
Over the past 18 months, ASM has gone through a significant transformation. It is now a critical ingredient in Dell’s private cloud solutions, provides unified management for our converged infrastructure solutions and will make our reference architectures come to life with template-based automation for rapid and repeatable deployments.
ASM’s design philosophy is centered on profound simplicity, openness and end-to-end automation enabling superior speed, efficiency and flexibility across the data center. ASM Innovations include:
- An open and extensible architecture with published APIs that gives customers and partners flexibility to easily integrate with 3rd party hardware and virtualization platforms.
- Superior user experience and rich feature set based on an ideal combination of Dell intellectual property and the best of open source technology
- A long history of actively contributing innovations to the open source community
Faster than Cisco UCS, and more efficient too
The benefits of this innovation are clear in a recent study published by Principled Technologies favorably compares ASM to Cisco UCS, noting: “With its intuitive, wizard-driven automation, we found that Dell Active System Manager was easier to use than a Cisco UCS solution, and required less time and effort to deploy enterprise solutions.”
See the Principled Technologies White Paper for more detail.
Active System Manager 8.1
Today we are announcing Active System Manager 8.1 which continues to deliver on our promise of an open extensible platform. Published REST APIs with ASM 8.1 make ASM even more open, extensible and flexible in a way that benefits all levels of the ecosystem from Dell, through partners and to customers by enabling them to:
- Support a wider set of heterogeneous 3rd party hardware, to integrate more easily into legacy and non-Dell environments
- Give value-added partners and systems integrators the opportunity to create unique and custom solutions, and create services revenue
- Give customers the confidence that the system is future-safe and will not lock them in to Dell or to currently available technologies
- Integrate ASM into established and legacy processes
Learn more about ASM here, and be sure to join the conversation by following us on Twitter @DellConverged.