At Dell’s recent Analyst Conference, I had the opportunity to meet with Marty Kacin, one of the founders of KACE Networks, to review Dell’s KACE systems management appliances. Dell acquired Kace Networks in 2010 to help fill out its SMB systems management offering, and Michael Dell highlighted the products during his keynote at the conference. Dell’s KACE offering consists of a pair of plug-and-play devices that provide full PC and server lifecycle management for Windows, Linux and Mac OS systems. These systems meet the vast majority of management needs of SMB users, without incurring the complexity and training that is typically associated with enterprise management frameworks.
There are two main products in the KACE product line, the K1000 Management Appliance and the K2000 Deployment Appliance. The K1000 performs typical systems management functions, such as device discovery and inventory, reporting, asset management, patch management, help desk, security, and audit. The K2000 is used for disk imaging, Windows driver management, network OS installation, remote systems repair and recovery, remote site management, and inventory scanning and assessment. Of course, there are many more capabilities than we can list in a single paragraph. The KACE appliances can be deployed on either a physical 1U server, or within a virtual server.
One of the reasons Dell is seeing such success with the KACE appliance is the ease at which it can be deployed. Once the product is purchased, it is installed on the network and it goes to work automatically creating an inventory. There are no lengthy off-site training classes to take, no software installations, and no expensive professional services required. Instead, new users simply spend an hour or two with a web training module to master the basics. Most everything else is intuitive after that. These appliances are closely linked to Dell, and they go out to the Dell support site regularly to retrieve the latest patches and drivers. Systems administrators are then given to option of deploying them or not. Most updates can automatically be pushed to PCs and servers overnight when system usage is very low, and while the systems administrators are home asleep.
Usually we don’t highlight systems management products. There are far too many exciting areas of IT to write about, and systems management is generally not one of them. But we feel the Dell KACE systems management appliances help to bring a new level of simplicity to a very mundane but critical task. The capabilities of KACE appliances are comprehensive, accomplishing just about all the tasks that systems managers need to do, including remote management. KACE is also simple to set up, simple to learn, and simple to use. In the past, SMB users typically had to choose between deploying massive systems management frameworks or haphazard collections of individual products. Frameworks were complex and difficult to master, while individual products lacked integration and rarely did everything that needed to be done. Dell KACE is the first product we have seen that hits the ‘sweet spot’ for SMB systems management. It is definitely worth a closer look for users in SMB environments.
This is a good analysis. My experience is that the KACE architecture works very well for 500 node environments and below. The rich feature set is of great value.
For larger environments like mine in mid-size business the agent architecture, lack of true AD integration, and lack of collaboration when multiple admins are working, make management in larger environments a challenge.
Posted by: David Traffer | July 08, 2011 at 08:40 PM