Chapter 16: Asset Management for Server Hardware and Software

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Because so much technology is now in use in just about any company and due to the sheer size and extent of today's enterprise IT department, managing server hardware and software has become more important than ever. In particular, attention must be given to inventory and license management, often referred to as IT asset management. In this chapter, we first take a detailed look at the asset management field and its value, the installed base, leading products, and more. We take a look at various asset management approaches, including the deployment of Microsoft Systems Management Server, as well as simple tools that take care of server hardware and software asset management without taking up much in the way of time and resources. This is an area anyone involved in server disk management really needs to know about; otherwise, you are unlikely to know exactly how many disks you have, where they are, and what type they are. Asset management software helps IT staff stay on the top of the game and in touch with the current deployment of disks, space quotas, and more throughout the enterprise.

The Asset Management Explosion

An explosion in the adoption of IT asset management software has occurred over the past few years. According to International Data Corporation (IDC; Framingham, Massachusetts), this market will grow from $1.1 billion in 2000 to $2.8 billion by 2004. A cursory search on the Web for vendors in this category revealed over 50, and that includes just those that were immediately findable. With so many vendors operating in this space, it is not surprising to learn that the installed base is already around the 40 million mark. About 85 percent of the large-site market, in particular, is already owned by tools such as Computer Associates' Asset Management Option (AMO), Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS), IBM Tivoli, Novell ZenWorks, and Intel LANDesk Management, among others. These products include functions such as software distribution and configuration management. Among small to medium-sized organizations, however, only about one third have adopted asset management.

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