Dell Active System Manager

Dell Active System Manager is a converged or unified management solution that brings Dell’s active systems and active solutions together to facilitate automated workload delivery and comprehensive end-to-end infrastructure lifecycle management. This tool is designed to simplify data center management by centralizing and automating the deployment, monitoring, and scaling of IT resources through a single interface.

At Tech Field Day 9, Dell’s Ganesh Padmanabhan presented Active System Manager (ASM), emphasizing its capabilities in template-driven provisioning, workflow orchestration, and integrated infrastructure lifecycle management. ASM allows IT teams to utilize resource pooling, dynamic allocation, and automation to create and manage workloads efficiently. It features a self-service web portal for both IT and business users to access pre-configured templates that provision resources like storage, networking, and compute infrastructure automatically. These templates include orchestration steps for setup, scaling, and teardown, enabling users to deploy environments on-demand without manual reconfiguration. Dell built ASM with flexibility in mind, enabling support for future infrastructure through resource adapters and offering custom engagement options for non-standard environments.

The demo presented showcased several operational features of ASM, including its ability to discover new infrastructure, assign resources to pools, and support Active Directory integration. Through its admin console, architects can design templates by dragging and dropping elements to define their infrastructure layout and orchestrated actions. These templates can be exported, customized, and potentially shared within a future user ecosystem. Additionally, administrators can schedule sessions, perform lifecycle maintenance like firmware upgrades, and integrate with vCenter for monitoring. While ASM currently lacks publicly available APIs, it’s REST-based and designed to support external integration in future releases. Dell’s vision is to evolve ASM into an ecosystem-driven automated infrastructure management tool that bridges the benefits of private on-premise environments with cloud-like agility.