Avocent Reaches Milestone -- An Avocent-Enabled Server Is Purchased Every 15 Seconds

Avocent® Corporation (NASDAQ:AVCT) has reached a significant milestone within its agentless business -- approximately one server containing Avocent IPMI firmware is purchased every 15 seconds. This milestone illustrates Avocent’s growing leadership in providing agentless management solutions to the world’s leading server manufacturers. These companies use Avocent’s solutions to pre-integrate standardized, value-added IT manageability features into their servers -- aiding IT customers by filling manageability gaps inherent in traditional software management products that require Operating System (OS) agents to operate. In comparison, agentless offerings require no OS agent. Combined, agentless and agent-based management offers full life-cycle management no matter the state or condition of the system -- from pre-OS through to OS unresponsive. Avocent’s agentless business combines system-level features such as KVM and Virtual Media together with multiple industry standards that provide a common method for hardware-level server manageability in data center and enterprise environments. Those industry standards include: the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI), Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware (SMASH) standard (developed by the Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. [DMTF®]), and Web Services for Management (WS-Management). With over 50 design wins, Avocent’s agentless business represents an important part of Avocent’s overall strategy. "Almost ten years ago, IPMI emerged as a standardized agentless management technology. Since then, IPMI’s adoption has grown considerably because it offers vendor-neutral server management, regardless of the state of a server’s OS,” commented Audrey Rasmussen, Principal Analyst for IT analyst firm Ptak, Noel and Associates. "With the emergence of next generation standards like SMASH and DASH, which are value-add interfaces layered on top of IPMI, IPMI- enabled servers deliver built-in, simplified and integrated agentless management capabilities out-of-the-box.” IPMI Initiated several years ago by Dell™, HP, Intel and NEC®, IPMI standardizes the hardware management interfaces and processes that can help address many manageability challenges. Today, IPMI is included in many Dell, HP and IBM Servers. In fact, more than 180 vendors are IPMI adopters. The latest revision, IPMI v2.0, adds new capabilities over previous versions. Most notable are enhanced authentication (SHA-1 and HMAC-based) and encryption (AES and RC-4), improved blade and virtual LAN (VLAN) support. IPMI defines a common and secure interface to how vendors can enable IT to monitor their system hardware and sensors (temperature, voltage, fan, etc.), control system components (power supplies, blades, etc.), log important system events (chassis intrusion, system reset, etc.), and allow administrators to remotely manage and recover failed systems. More information on IPMI can be found at http://www.avocent.com/web/en.nsf/Content/learnmoreIPMI. Systems Administrator Wally Edmondson at the University of Tennessee SimCenter at Chattanooga (UTC SimCenter) is one of many IPMI users that have realized benefits from implementing its use. The UTC SimCenter uses a high performance scientific supercomputing server cluster to run a computational engineering research and education center. "For anyone not using IPMI, they don’t know what they are missing,” said Edmondson. "There’s a huge time saver you have already paid for just sitting under the covers of your cluster.” Edmondson added that before IPMI he "used to have to physically inspect each server, make a list on a piece of paper to which servers needed attention, and then return to my office and dispatch them one way or another. Now, in seconds, I can look at my monitor and identify and resolve any issues from my desk.” SMASH In emergency and/or ad-hoc situations, administrators often need to interactively manage various servers using specific commands. The challenge however is that different vendors use different commands to do the same thing. Enter SMASH. Defined by the DMTF, the SMASH working group released its first specification last year -- the SMASH Command Line Protocol (CLP). SMASH CLP addresses IT administrator needs for a universal command line -- enabling systems offered by different vendors to be managed with the same commands and scripts. It’s helpful to think of IPMI and SMASH as collaborating with each other. Even though IPMI offers a standardized message interface for developers and vendors inside the server, the server’s command line interface often varies from vendor to vendor. Think of SMASH then as the scriptable command line interface (CLI) available out of the box, accessing the IPMI hardware management features in the box. For IT administrators who see the importance of using a consistent SMASH command interface for existing IPMI servers, consider using a dedicated appliance, like the Avocent MergePoint™ 5200 service processor manager. By forcing administrator access to servers via a dedicated appliance in the rack, you can offer additional security and control as well as use a single set of SMASH CLP commands across multiple servers. Furthermore, as a SMASH CLP gateway, the MergePoint 5200 appliance provides the benefit of consistency beyond IPMI across service processors from multiple vendors, such as Dell Remote Access Cards (DRAC) and Hewlett-Packard Integrated Lights Out (iLO). More information on the MergePoint 5200 appliance can be found at http://www.avocent.com/web/en.nsf/Content/MergePoint5200, with further information on SMASH at http://www.dmtf.org/standards/smash/. WS-Management The WS-Management specification promotes interoperability between management applications and managed resources. It identifies a core set of Web service specifications and usage requirements to expose a common set of operations that are central to all systems management. These include the ability to discover the presence of management resources and to navigate between them, create or delete individual management resources, such as settings and dynamic values, subscribe to events emitted by managed resources and to execute specific management tasks. WS-Management was recently included in the DMTF’s Desktop and Mobile Architecture for System Hardware (DASH) Initiative, a suite of specifications delivering standards-based Web services management for desktop and mobile client systems. Combining IPMI and WS-Management offers hardware and software vendors’ improvements in accessing and exchanging device and management information between consoles and devices -- irrespective of the vendors’ agentless implementation. More information on WS-Management can be found at http://www.dmtf.org/standards/wbem/wsman. "Agentless technologies continue to play an increasingly important cost-cutting and time-saving role in infrastructure management and the milestones achieved by Avocent are testament to this,” commented Steve Rokov, director of marketing, Avocent. "With important capabilities, such as hardware health monitoring, threshold setting and remote power cycling, specifically and uniquely available during states when other management tools cannot function, agentless enjoys growing relevancy in enterprise, data center, and other high performance computing environments.” About Avocent Corporation Avocent delivers IT operations and infrastructure management solutions for enterprises worldwide, helping customers reduce the cost and simplify the management of complex IT environments via integrated, centralized in-band and out-of-band hardware and software. Through LANDesk, Avocent also is a leading provider of systems, security, and process management solutions. Additional information is available at: www.avocent.com. Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains statements that are forward-looking statements as defined within the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These include statements regarding the development of new systems and management solutions and Avocent's growth and expansion into these and other new markets. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the statements made, including the risks associated with the integration of the LANDesk businesses and technologies, risks associated with general economic conditions, risks attributable to future product demand, sales, and expenses, risks associated with product design efforts and the introduction of new products and technologies, and risk associated with obtaining and protecting intellectual property rights. Other factors that could cause operating and financial results to differ are described in Avocent's reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Avocent, the Avocent logo, The Power of Being There, MergePoint, DSR and DSView are trademarks or registered trademarks of Avocent Corporation or its affiliates. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.