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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dorine Essey who wrote (140162)	8/21/1999 11:12:00 PM
From: TechMkt	Respond to of 176387

The services offered by DELL keep getting better. Fez ____________________________ Dell E-Support Service Peeks Into Servers By Todd Spangler, Inter@ctive Week August 19, 1999 3:34 PM ET It's a kind of virtual heartbeat monitor for computers. Next week, Dell Computer will begin offering a first-of-its-kind service that will proactively monitor Dell customers' servers - and eventually their PCs - over the Internet. The service, called the OpenManage Resolution Assistant, will be free to all Dell customers and will ship on all of its PowerEdge servers starting this week. The OpenManage Resolution Assistant software, available at first only for Microsoft Windows NT Server machines, resides on a server and watches for any errors or failures, notifying Dell's technical support center if anything goes awry. Dell support personnel can remotely check the server's vital signs and also can execute on-the-fly scripts to diagnose the problem. If necessary, Dell will ship out replacement parts or dispatch on-site repair technicians -before customers even know they are having technical difficulties. "Today, on servers specifically, when someone reports a problem it can take some imagination to figure out what went wrong," said Bert Dumars, marketing manager in Dell's systems management group. "With this new service we're moving from reactive to proactive support." Dell expects the Internet monitoring service to not only increase uptime of customers' PCs, but also to greatly reduce its tech support costs. "More than 90 percent of the servers returned to Dell don't have anything wrong with the hardware," Dumars said. But, as Dumars acknowledged, security issues are keeping some of Dell's customers from embracing the new Net-based management service. The server-based agent communicates via an encrypted and authenticated session back to the Dell tech support center. Nevertheless, to allow fully automated monitoring, customers must punch a hole in their firewalls - a step that some security managers will absolutely refuse to do. "We know some enterprise customers aren't going to let us change their firewall configurations," Dumars said. To reduce security threats, OpenManage Resolution Assistant can run in a manual mode that notifies the local network administrator of problems. Alternatively, the agent software can be configured to send e-mail to Dell's support operations, a more secure method than directly linking, Dumars said. The OpenManage Resolution Assistant, which uses network management software developed by Intel, Motive and Watergate, is designed to look mainly for hardware-related problems. Dumars said that Dell's technical support team also can handle certain software snafus, but would refer application-specific problems to the vendor that supplied it. Future enhancements planned for the service include agents that will be able to monitor servers running Linux and Novell's NetWare, as well as Windows software for desktop and laptop PCs. Next year, Dell also expects to provide an option to customers that would let support techs remotely reboot a dead server, and a feature that will automatically download relevant BIOS updates and other software patches to PCs. "Small businesses will definitely want to have this service," Dumars said. "Large customers will also be interested, but they've been saying, 'You're a release or two away from us deploying this.' "