Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager and the Virtualization-Ready Data Center

One of the biggest challenges facing IT organizations is the need to adapt their IT infrastructure rapidly to meet changing enterprise demands. Many data centers today are static — administrators determine a server's function even before deployment, and the server continues to deliver the same function regardless of usage patterns, utilization or performance. Responding to hardware failures requires performing complex, time-consuming tasks across multiple areas of the infrastructure.

Dell™ Advanced Infrastructure Manager (AIM) enables IT organizations to move beyond static designs toward a virtualization-ready data center by providing an operational model for automating the infrastructure. This model enables change to be part of everyday activity. By using Dell AIM, administrators can perform management tasks simply and efficiently, including rapidly provisioning physical servers and virtual machines (VMs), network connectivity and storage access without manual intervention. The key enabling technology in Dell AIM is the logical separation of the server software — its 'personality' or persona — from the actual hardware. In this context, the persona is a software construct that combines the server's OS and installed applications with metadata that describes its unique properties and configuration. Key features of Dell AIM include centralized end-to-end provisioning, automated server failover, integrated virtualization management and unified infrastructure resource management. Dell AIM also provides a methodology that gradually transforms a data center from static to dynamic in a manageable way.

As the foundation for a truly dynamic data center, Dell AIM enables change to be the norm, not the exception. It offers an open, standards-based software solution designed to unify and simplify the management of heterogeneous servers, storage devices and networks — while offering a smooth migration path toward a virtualization-ready data center that can adapt quickly and easily as enterprise needs change.