SoC hosts complete system management

The KIRA100 is the first single chip solution for high-quality platform control and remote server access to combine KVM-over-IP technology with all key platform manageability access methods.

Peppercon reckons the KIRA100 is the industry's first single chip solution for high-quality platform control and remote server access to combine KVM-over-IP technology with all the key platform manageability access methods.

For end customers, the multistandard, high-performance KIRA100 chip minimises server downtime and increases IT productivity by enabling operating system installation, BIOS upgrade and power cycling on a server to be done remotely.

In addition, the ASIC-based chip helps Tier-One server partners and server OEMs save board space and reduce system costs.

The KIRA100 supports all standardised access protocol methods in the marketplace, including IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface), SSH (Secure Shell), WS-Management (Web Services Based Management Protocol) and SMASH-CLP (Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware-Command Line Protocol).

In addition to its excellent KVM-over-IP redirection, Peppercon's KIRA100 provides virtual media support that covers a broad range of mass storage emulation variations - including virtual-floppy emulation, CD/DVD-drive emulation and even direct mass-storage redirection.

Additionally, it offers advanced features to prevent downtime, such as health management consisting of IPMI2.0-based server hardware monitoring.

"With KIRA100, Peppercon demonstrates its unwavering focus on providing a state-of-the-art feature set for best-in-class platform control to its OEM customers", said Swen Anderson, CTO at Peppercon.

"The KIRA100 offers OEM customers a very powerful, modular and flexible way to tailor-make server platform designs in order to meet the specific needs of their customers".

"We applaud and support all efforts to create common platform interface standards, such as Open Platform Management Architecture (OPMA) and Advanced System Management Interface (ASMI)".

"KIRA100 is flexible enough to serve as the manageability engine for cards that support the different capabilities of each of these standards, thus helping our customers reduce cost and time to market".

"Peppercon's KIRA100 ASIC has the potential to build on the success achieved by their OPMA M3-Module which is offered to original equipment manufacturers today", said Marty Seyer, Corporate Vice President, Commercial Business and Performance Computing, AMD.

"In addition to the industry-leading performance-per-watt delivered by the AMD Opteron processor with Direct Connect Architecture, AMD's enterprise server customers will continue to benefit from innovative third-party solutions that support open, royalty-free platform interface standards like OPMA".

Peppercon's OPMA M3-Module was the industry's first management subsystem to support the OPMA standard.

"Our OEM customers are now able to build support for improved server management into their systems with the confidence that solutions such as Peppercon's ASMI-based card will complete the solution", said Hemant Dhulla, General Manager of Intel's Manageability and Platform Software Division.

"This design helps to optimise operating costs and to protect investment for Intel server board manufacturers and enables enterprise management software solutions to easily communicate with a large number of ASMI-based platforms".

The KIRA100 baseboard management controller (BMC) is a fully integrated system-on-a-chip microprocessor, which incorporates all the necessary function blocks and interfaces to provide a complete and cost-effective remote management solution that fits all server management architectures.

The KIRA100 is based on a 32bit, high-performance, lower-power 920T ARM Architecture V4 RISC microprocessor.

It is equipped with a media coprocessor to accelerate video processing, and a comprehensive set of system and peripheral functions that are useful in a variety of remote management applications.

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