University Uses IPMI

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. -- The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC) SimCenter has implemented the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) reducing their operational costs by about $60,000 per year. The UTC SimCenter uses a high performance scientific supercomputing server cluster to run a computational engineering research and education center. Avocent IPMI technology pre-integrated within the majority of SimCenter servers allows IT staff to more rapidly access information about system components, manage power control, and monitor overall system hardware health remotely - increasing server availability for their clients – all from a single interface.

UTC Systems Administrator Wally Edmondson was spending a lot of his time on management issues such as powering on and off servers, maintaining temperature stability and viewing boot and OS console screens to help troubleshoot server errors within the SimCenter. Using IPMI changed this routine for the better.

“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. Furthermore, using this agentless management approach responds to our need for expansion in that the amount of time to manage the cluster without IPMI might be so great that it would prevent us from expanding without hiring more people.”

Avocent Corp.