One of the biggest challenges in the software industry today is software configuration and change management. In the past, in large purchases, oftentimes it was not the manufacturer with the fastest or cheapest machines that wins the deal, but rather the manufacturer with the most complete, easy-to-use, and comprehensive systems management software that won. Today, this is now true about change management. The manufacturer who demonstrates the most comprehensive change management strategy often wins.
In the past, the native OS had insufficient tools to handle the variety of change management tasks required to handle drivers, bios, and firmware. Because of this, system vendors wrote their own tools to handle change management for these components.
Today, that situation has changed. All modern linux-based operating systems include facilities such as yum, apt, or equivalent. These native OS tools can be leveraged to provide a unified and complete change management solution for all end-users needs, from addon applications, to drivers, firmware and BIOS.
This talk will discuss moves that Dell is making in this area to provide its tools in frameworks so that they can be consumed by these standard systems management tools. It will discuss the unofficial Dell yum repository serving Dell OpenManage Server Administrator, and the Dell system-specific yum repositories serving a variety of driver updates for specific Dell systems. It will discuss the firmware-tools project, where we provide a framework and infrastructure to deliver BIOS and Firmware updates using yum and RPM infrastructure.