American Megatrends Custom Built Server Management Platform for OpenPOWER

By Christine M. Follett, Marketing Communications Manager, American Megatrends, Inc.

As one of the newest members of the OpenPOWER Foundation, we at American Megatrends, Inc. (AMI) are very excited get started and contribute to the mission and goals of the Foundation. Our President and CEO, Subramonian Shankar, who founded the company thirty years ago, shares his thoughts on joining the Foundation:

“Participating in OpenPOWER with partners such as IBM and TYAN will allow AMI to more rapidly engage as our market continues to grow, and will ensure our customers receive the industry’s most reliable and feature-rich platform management technologies. As a market leader for core server firmware and management technologies, we are eager to assist industry leaders in enabling next generation data centers as they rethink their approach to systems design.”

The primary technology that AMI is currently focusing on relative to its participation in the OpenPOWER Foundation is a full-featured server management solution called MegaRAC® SPX, in particular a custom version of this product developed for POWER8-based platforms. MegaRAC SPX for POWER8 is a powerful development framework for server management solutions composed of firmware and software components based on industry standards like IPMI 2.0, SMASH, Serial over LAN (SOL). It offers key serviceability features including remote presence, CIM profiles and advanced automation.

MegaRAC SPX for POWER8 also features a high level of modularity, with the ability to easily configure and build firmware images by selecting features through an intuitive graphical development tool chain. These features are available in independently maintained packages for superior manageability of the firmware stack. You can learn more about MegaRAC SPX at our website dedicated to AMI remote management technology here.

Foundation founding member TYAN has been an early adopter of MegaRAC SPX for POWER8, adopting it for one of their recent platforms. According to Albert Mu, Vice President of MITAC Computing Technology Corporation’s TYAN Business Unit, “AMI has been a critical partner in the development of our POWER8-based platform, the TN71-BP012, which is based on the POWER8 Architecture and provides tremendous memory capacity as well as outstanding performance that fits in datacenter, Big Data or HPC environments. We are excited that AMI has strengthened its commitment to the POWER8 ecosystem by joining the OpenPOWER Foundation.”

Founded in 1985, AMI is known worldwide for its AMIBIOS® firmware. From our start as the industry’s original independent BIOS vendor, we have evolved to become a key supplier of state-of-the-art hardware, software and utilities to top-tier manufacturers of desktop, server, mobile and embedded computing systems.

With AMI’s extensive product lines, we are uniquely positioned to provide all of the fundamental components to help OpenPOWER innovate across the system stack, providing performance, manageability, and availability for today’s modern data centers. AMI prides itself on its unique position as the only company in the industry that offers products and services based on all of these core technologies.

AMI is extremely proud to join our fellow OpenPOWER member organizations working collaboratively to build advanced server, networking, storage and acceleration technology as well as industry-leading open source software. Together we can deliver more choice, control and flexibility to developers of next-generation hyperscale and cloud data centers.

About Christine M. Follett

Christine M. Follett is Marketing Communications Manager for American Megatrends, Inc. (AMI). Together with the global sales and marketing team of AMI, which spans seven countries, she works to expand brand awareness and market share for the company’s diverse line of OEM, B2B/Channel and B2C technology products, including AMI’s industry leading Aptio® V UEFI BIOS firmware, innovative StorTrends® Network Storage hardware and software products, MegaRAC® remote server management tools and unique solutions based on the popular Android™ and Linux® operating systems.