Redfish

Companies Dell, Vertiv (before Emerson Network Power), announced HP and Intel creation of the specification of the new standard of off-line control by the hardware which should replace Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI). Software to their opinion which is released 16 years of IPMI became outdated and it does not suit for control of the modern IT equipment. The new specification which received the name Redfish while is in a development stage, it should undergo formal consideration and get approval of the industry.

Redfish assumes remote control of computers on allocated channel (оut-of-band), i.e. irrespective of the operating system and from whether the machine is switched on. Thus it is possible to trace and change the BIOS settings or to control such parameters as temperature, tension, operation of fans, power sources, etc. Management requires network connection, and a system should be included in the electric socket. Founders of Redfish are going to add later and support of management on network (in-band).

The IPMI standard which appeared in 1998 was supported by all leading vendors. However it became outdated and ceased to describe adequately modern difficult computing environments and server architectures (at the time of creation IPMI servers still were controlled 8-bit microcontrollers).

Redfish, his creators say, represents a product of development of IPMI and is aimed at elimination of restrictions of the predecessor. It is cross-platformnoye the solution allowing to integrate different types of servers, storage systems, operating systems and networks. Its RESTful API and a data model can be upgraded independently of each other. It is much better, than IPMI, copes with scaling and is suitable for management of both server racks, and separate nodes. Besides, during creation of Redfish modern standards of security were considered.

Now the specification of the new standard should be sent to Distributed Management Task Force – the industry organization which is responsible for development, acceptance and promotion of standards of management^[1] IT infrastructure^[2].

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