HP ProLiant DL288 ISS Technology Update Volume 7, Number 10 - Page 4

ISS Technology Update Volume 7, Number 10 How much customer input goes into the design of your products? Brian: Customer feedback is very important to us because customers are more likely to purchase HP products if we can meet their requirements. I personally go through several design concepts before I finally settle on the top one or two design recommendations. Some of the questions I always ask are • Is the solution mechanically friendly to the customer and service person? • How can we improve the total customer value for the product, extend the server's lifetime, and lower the total cost of ownership? • How can we "future proof" our product design and provide customers with an upgrade path as technology evolves across the lifetime of the platform. As the server development model has evolved industry-wide, what adjustments has ISS engineering made to maintain technological leadership? Brian: There has been a significant paradigm shift in the relationship between product development and how our engineers develop their technical and debugging skills. Prior to the prevalence of ODM (outsourced development model) or JDM (joint development model) product development, our engineering staff gained knowledge through continuous, hands-on experience. During the course of the product development cycle, engineers would naturally progress from fixing simple issues, to debugging basic problems, to understanding various hardware and software interactions, and then to debugging significantly complex issues. Today, the ODM/JDM partner is quite capable of fixing the less complex issues. This leaves HP engineers to debug a higher percentage of complex issues than before, which demands that they understand how all of the software and hardware pieces interact with each other. The ODM/JDM model gives senior engineers more opportunities for one-on-one mentoring of younger engineers to strengthen their system architecture knowledge and debug skills. This gives younger engineers a deeper understanding of system architecture, and it helps them to continue developing innovative technologies for HP products. Common SM CLP scripting commands for ProLiant server management This is the last in a series of three articles that discuss common SM CLP (Server Management Command Line Protocol) scripting commands. Links to the previous articles are listed in "Additional resources" at the end of this article. SM CLP is one of the communication, or access, protocols that can be used with the Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware (SMASH). This article discusses the SM CLP syntax and properties. SM CLP is accessed using Secure Shell (SSH). SSH can be interactive (as in a shell) or it can execute in a "command" mode by processing a single command at a time suitable for scripting. The following examples use SSH command mode, using a Windows utility (plink) that provides SSH command line support. Plink and PuTTY executables, source code, and license terms are freely distributed on the web. Other SSH command line utilities should support this functionality in a similar manner. The SM CLP organizes commands into different functions- targets, properties, and verbs. • Targets refer to the grouping of related objects, such as the host server (system1) or iLO, the "management access point" (map1). Targets can be subdivided into smaller groups using a folder-style naming convention-all the subordinate targets are presented in the output from the "show" verb. • Properties represent related attributes for the given target. • Verbs represent the actions that can be taken on a given target and property. The following examples specify user credentials on the command line. If user credentials are not specified, iLO 2 prompts for account credentials, interrupting the process. iLO 2 also supports SSH key-based authentication. 4