White Paper

Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials
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acquire and easily adopted by existing staff. Deployment of these management tools should minimize
investment in time and resources and quantitatively return that investment quickly.
In this whitepaper, we will address these questions with Dell’s innovative approach to systems
management. The Dell|KACE K1000 Systems Management Appliance, combined with Dell OpenManage
Essentials, provides a simple, cost-effective, and comprehensive approach that meets the needs of
most enterprises.
The following diagram illustrates how these products interact to provide a solution for proactive
systems management.
Solution overview of Dell OpenManage Essentials and Dell|KACE Figure 1.
 Inventorying and Managing Data Center Assets—Computer environment inventory requires that
the data collected be comprehensive for virtualization platforms, network devices, printers,
computer hardware and software. This data collection must be kept up-to-date in a way that
does not distract from other day-to-day tasks. Both OME and the K1000 leverage industry-
standard SNMP, IPMI, CIM, WMI, and other protocols to fully automate this task.
 Managing System Configurations—Managing consistent system configurations across multiple
systems is essential to maintaining overall compute environment health. The combination of
OpenManage and KACE allow this capability to be centrally controlled across a heterogeneous
environment.
 Managing Dell System Updates—Keeping driver and firmware updates in control is essential as
you work to protect your Dell computing investment. Both OME and the K1000 offer fully
integrated Dell system update capabilities to provide you with choices that best meet your
environments needs.
 Assessing and Resolving Security Vulnerabilities—The Dell|KACE K1000 Systems Management
Appliance provides vulnerability assessment tools based on industry standards and fully
integrated patch management, configuration management, and distribution capabilities to
resolve identified threats.