BMC Software Inc has won a significant endorsement from Intel Corp, which is to embed the Houston, Texas-based company’s Patrol intelligent agent technology into its i960 RP I/O processor, allowing users to monitor data traffic at the mother board level and optimize resources accordingly. The significance of the win is that the i960 RP processor is key to specifications being created by the I2O Intelligent Interface Organization to which vendors such as Compaq, IBM, HP, DEC, Novell, SCO and others will build next-generation server products. The I2O spec, which provides an operating system- and hardware-independent specification for creating portable device drivers, is designed to remove I/O bottlenecks associated by offloading I/O tasks from the CPU on to i960 RP-based I/O subsystems. Intel began sampling the part last month and expects early implementations next quarter with mainstream server manufacturers announcing products at Comdex Fall for shipment in the first two quarters of 1997. Although BMC and Int el anticipate Windows NT and NetWare configurations in their announcement, they were quick to point out – if not in print – that the all-PCI I2O spec applies equally to Unix, pointing to SCO’s membership of the group. There’s no license or royalty arrangement; BMC makes its money selling Patrol Knowledge Modules which monitor and manage information received from agents. As it does for its other device, database and application agents, BMC will provide a Knowledge Module for the i960 RP agent that’ll include a set of routine response guidelines which the agents can act upon without having to alert the console.
However BMCO’s hardware, database and application management agents can also be interpreted by a number of third- party management environments with the appropriate adapters, including CA-Unicenter. The creation of BMC’s first firmware agents is significant not only for BMC and Intel, but also for the development of long overdue management out-of-the-box. BMC says its agents will work at a lower level than the management technologies Intel has partnered with Tivoli Systems Inc and Computer Associates International Inc for. Intel says version 1.5 of the I2O spec due this summer will include support for Desktop Management Interface APIs which Tivoli, CA and others use to manage Intel systems. The I2O group includes Intel, Microsoft, Novell, Compaq, HP, NetFrame, 3Com, Symbios, IBM, DEC, Sun and others. Under its spec, peripherals will supposedly be capable of routing data without sending calls to the CPU. The routing scheme is similar to Tandem Computer Inc’s ServerNet, though the ServerNet PCI buses are memory-based instead of being truly intelligent. As well as creating higher throughput systems I2O also promises to make any driver compatible with any piece of software without custom instructions, saving manufacturers significant development costs for multiple ports. The spec effectively decouples the connection between the operating system and operations so that device driver developers don’t have to write to specific software platforms but write instead to a common messaging layer that circumvents incompatibilities. The layer, which fits between drivers and operating systems and makes drivers and peripheral devices processor- and operating system- independent, is based on a NetFrame Systems Inc message-passing layer that has been part of the company’s systems since 1989. Although I2O exacts a slight performance cost for each node, it expects to make up for any loss in speed with much greater throughput performance, making large fast clustered systems possible. I2O also lets NT nodes communicate with Unix and mainframe nodes and allows users to add devices, such as an EISA card, without having to shut down the system. Intel is bundling Unix veteran Wind River Systems Inc’s IxWorks- embedded operating system with the i960 RP. IxWorks, an I2O derivative of Wind River’s VxWorks real-time embedded operating system, will allow hardware designers to write I/O adapter cards such as SCSI, ATM and Fiber Channels to a common network operating system-independent interface. It uses the Wind microkernel that VxWorks is based on and is specific to the RP chip. Technically, I2O’s a proprietary spec; special interest group members get rights to it as part of their membership fee; other companies have to buy a license. By the end of 1997, I2O plans to have an additional group of specifications finished covering a broad range of client/server I/O connectivity issues including clustering connectivity and fault tolerance, peer-to- peer communications, server/network management, fiber channel technology, ATM and WAN applications, 64-bit addressing, RAID I/O and real-time operating system connectivity.
