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My final year dissertation project is a software tool for asset tracking in a data center environment. The basic idea is that you run this tool after install your Solaris machine, and it reports back information about the hardware to a database for later inspection. Its also has hooks for being run as a service, so you can probe the machine at any time to see what its got. Simple enough, right?

Well, Sun has just announced that their Service Tag technology has just been open sourced. They fit in as a part to their Sun Connection infrastructure management platform. Basically, the service tags are the little bits of software used to identify you hardware and report it back to you. This can be implemented for hardware and software, and should mean that ISVs and all hardware vendors can make their products that little bit easier to manage! To quote the site:

Open Service Tag is the reference implementation of a standards initiative that will seek the involvement of OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturer) and ISVs (Independent Software Vendor) to define a standard definition for product identification and discovery.

This is very good news for System Administrators! I can speak from experience that its not nice having to open up hundreds of machines looking for a particular piece of hardware, because there isn’t a command to find it. I truly hope that Sun go through all their back catalog of hardware to make sure absolutely everything is possible to find! This should also include bits of hardware that carry other interesting things built in, like motherboard network interfaces.

Its also quite entertaining that if a Sun product isn’t called a “Sun Java Web enabled, scalable ..” something or other, it still has important sounding features like “Sun Update Satellite Console”.

Its also surprising that Sun has been working on this since May 2007 and I’ve missed it till now! A high level overview of how this might help you manage your enterprise can be found here.