Intel® vPro™ Technology

Innovating Above and Beyond Standards

How It All Began

In the late 1980s analysts such as the Gartner Group popularized the term total cost of ownership (TCO). TCO reflected the cost to support a personal computer (PC) over the lifetime of that PC, and it was found to be a much higher cost consideration than the cost of the system itself (over $10,000 in support costs versus an initial PC cost of roughly $3,000 at that time).

The high cost of supporting a PC was a daunting challenge for IT organizations, and they had to weigh this cost carefully against the obvious benefits in personal productivity that PCs introduced.

Through the 1990s, Intel created the Wired for Management (WfM) initiative, and in the WfM 2.0 baseline, delivered related technologies, such as the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI), Wake on LAN (WOL), the Desktop Management Interface (DMI), and the Preboot eXecution Environment (PXE), as a set of tools to address the PC TCO reduction objective. However, IT organizations still had no widespread means of ensuring interoperability amongst multi-vendor solutions to manage systems remotely in their own environment. The Desktop Management Taskforce (DMTF) was formed to fill this need. This taskforce helps drive and establish manageability specifications and related initiatives within the industry. Early on, Intel saw the need for steadily evolving management specifications within the industry and led the formation of the DMTF¹.

Intel has taken on leadership roles throughout the life of the DMTF, acting as the founding chair of the board in the early years of the DMTF, contributing the first conformance tool for DMI, and creating and acting as chair for the Pre-Operating System (Pre-OS) Working Group. At the time of writing, Intel holds both the positions of Vice President of Interoperability and Co-lead for the Systems Management Forum, where compliance is being defined today. Intel has also recently made key contributions to the DMTF infrastructure by submitting Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) and Web Services Management (WS-MAN) technologies for use in DMTF specifications and technologies [2].

While the DMTF was putting the Common Information Model (CIM) and the DMI in place, Intel and IBM Corporation collaborated on the next level of client innovations in the development of Alert-on-LAN technologies that were integrated into IBM client platforms and into Intel chipsets. Alert-on-LAN delivered early innovation in the Out-of-Band (OOB) management space, and it was a subset of what would later become the alerting aspects of Intel® Active Management Technology (Intel® AMT).

As IT professionals, end users, and other industry players showed interest in Alert-on-LAN-based capabilities, Intel hosted a meeting with a number of independent hardware vendors (IHVs) to discuss and investigate the right level of specification around Alert-on-LAN. The outcome of that meeting was a draft charter for the Pre-OS Working Group in DMTF, and it formed the core of what would later be ratified, published, and implemented as the Alert Specification Format (ASF).

Intel® vPro™ Technology is Born

While Intel played a significant role in driving ASF through DMTF to its final 2.13 revision, with its editing and authoring contributions, Intel’s innovative efforts mainly focused on the ecosystem extensions to the Alert on LAN hardware support. Intel added more features and a broad ISV ecosystem that was based on the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). These provided IT organizations with timely solution-level options across a variety of their existing console vendors. The result was that IT organizations could realize interoperability value immediately, without waiting for future standards-based compliance tools and programs.

As part of Intel’s vision for helping to reduce IT organizations’ TCO, Intel vPro technology was born. This new technology included Intel AMT, Intel® Trusted Execution Technology (Intel® TXT), and Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT). Intel vPro technology is designed to support a seamless transition to these new specifications as they are finalized as well as provide additional benefits in the meantime. In 2006, Intel released its first platform, enabled with Intel® vPro™ technology, that supported SOAP-based capabilities and the ASF specification.

As the industry accepted and embraced these new specifications, it was clear that additional work was needed in the area of system hardware. In 2007, the DMTF published the Desktop and Mobile Architecture for System Hardware (DASH) specification which, according to the DMTF, is “a suite of specifications which standardize the manageability interfaces for mobile and desktop hardware. The DASH suite of specifications defines the external interfaces for management in the form of protocols and profiles for representing mobile and desktop hardware² [1]."

Intel® vPro™ Technology Goes Above and Beyond Standards

Figure 1: Intel® vPro™ technology innovation on top of standard specifications
Source: Intel Corporation, 2008

In 2007, Intel released its first DASH-capable platform enabled with Intel vPro technology. This platform integrated the pre-standard DASH 1.0 specifications available at the time, in addition to other innovative manageability and security capabilities. Examples of these innovative features include remote diagnostics/repair/configuration, enhanced system defense filters, 802.1x and Cisco SDN pre-OS support. More information on features and use cases in Intel vPro technology can be found at http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/vpro/vpro-technology-general.html.

Having identified the relevance of Web services to remote management, Intel and Microsoft Corporation collaborated on what would later be called WS-MAN, which eventually became the de facto Web services transport for not just DASH, but for all DMTF initiatives and technologies. WS-MAN is essentially replacing ASF as the standards-based remote communications mechanism for remote client platform management [2].

As illustrated in Figure 1, Intel vPro technology goes above and beyond the industry specifications to provide added innovative manageability capabilities in addition to supporting the required standards. One misunderstanding in the industry is that when a standard is in place, a solution provider can only deliver a solution that is standards-based and nothing more. That is not the case, as specifications do not dictate the complete list of capabilities available to a customer; rather, they enforce the minimum infrastructure elements and basic features necessary to facilitate interoperability between vendor implementations. DASH, for example, provides a standards-based protocol that forms the basis for external interfaces to discover capabilities and to interact with a platform, but it does not provide a description of how features are implemented. Platforms enabled with Intel vPro technology not only meet the needs of the IT professional by integrating a common set of specifications such as DASH, but they go above and beyond these by allowing IT organizations to achieve a lower TCO with additional manageability features that work across multi-vendor solutions and are enabled for the most relevant enterprise security and management consoles in the market.

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