Another example of driving innovation through standardization is an initiative to simplify system diagnostics. Part of my work as President of the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) is to make sure the member companies work together to formalize standards that benefit customers. Today, Dell and other members of the Common Diagnostic Model (CDM) Forum—AMD, HP, IBM, Intel, PC-Doctor, and Symantec—today launched an effort to unify the computer industry on a single interoperable interface for diagnostics. An industry kickoff event was held today in San Francisco, California.
The goal of this is simple: to develop diagnostics based on a common infrastructure so that systems and components can be diagnosed easily using a common set of tools. It also asks the developers of components such as disk drives, processors, network cards, etc. to deliver diagnostic providers based on this standard along with their components.
Today, to diagnose system problems, every manufacturer spends lots of time developing tools to exploit the different interfaces associated with various system components. With this new approach, components and their diagnostics will snap in to management and diagnostic frameworks that will be native on the platform.
This innovative standard should save time and money for customers and vendors. We expect that over the next few years enterprise and consumer systems will begin shipping with these enhanced capabilities that make it easier and quicker to diagnose problems.