Dell Embedded Systems Management updates

Over at the Dell TechCenter, Peter Tsai has posted a great update on some of the features of the latest firmware updates to the Dell Blade Chasis Management Controller 3.2 including 10gb Ethernet support and enablement; LifeCycle Controller 1.5 updates including complete out-of-band backup and restore, and config management support for Converged Network Adapters; and finally iDrac 1.6 updates.

Head over to the TechCenter page for the complete list of features plus a link to some new whitepapers. I have to say though, the best reason to head over there is to watch the video they did of the new LifeCycle controller feature to backup and restore feature during a motherboard replacement. The LC features uses WS-MAN to completely take a copy of all the configuration, drivers etc. so that when the motherboard is replaced it can be restored along with the Broadcom Nic, PERC and ServiceTag and Asset Tag making it in essence indistinguishable from the original. Brilliant.

Community involvement or free labor?

I’ve been following Andrew McAfee’s blog for a couple of weeks now, as a result of someone twittering a link to one of his blog entries. In his latest blog post, “Three Mantras“, McAfee discusses something many of the tech industry will recognize, self support systems. McAfee nicely summarizes the business opportunity to build around online communities as support subsystems.

I posted some of my thoughts on the topic in comments, namely the question of recognition and reward, not for participating, but for those that stay on and continue to participate. Initial participation is often self rewarding, we go look for help, experience or education in order to achieve some work related task. Need to get some help using a particular programming language or API – as Apple could have said “there’s a community forum for that!”

What makes McAfees blog interesting is his recognition of this phenomena, and his translation of it in to business terms and impact. For Dell, the guys that are part of the TechCenter have been doing a great job recently of creating knowledge and sharing it. They’ve recently run a number of demo and tech sessions on some of our key management technologies. You can find the Dell TechCenter here. It provides links into a wiki, Discussion Forums(just like the ones discussed by McAfee, the techcenter forum currently has some 34,000 topics) and the increasingly popular TechTuesday chats.

As I said in a comment to McAfee’s blog, this isn’t a new phenomena, as long ago as the late 1970’s I was first introduced to VMSHARE. A User run online bulletinboard/time sharing system aka forum to support and help users of IBM’s VM/370 operating system. While today there are many, many more forums, technologies and places to go for help, you can gain as much value from them today as I did then, because, and thats especially true for the Dell Techcenter, the people who participate are knowledgeable, dedicated and passionate about what they do, otherwise they wouldn’t do it.