White Papers

6 Implementation of the DMTF Redfish API on Dell EMC PowerEdge Servers
1 Introduction
Since the inception of the x86 server in the late 1980’s, IT administrators have sought the means to efficiently
manage a growing number of distributed resources. Industry suppliers have responded by developing
management interface standards to support common methods of monitoring and controlling heterogeneous
systems.
While management interfaces such as SNMP and IPMI have been present in data centers for the past
decade, they have not been able to meet the changing requirements due to security and technical limitations.
Further, the scale of deployment has grown significantly as IT models have evolved. Today, organizations
often rely on a large number of lower-cost servers with redundancy provided in the software layer, making
scalable management interfaces more critical.
To meet such market requirements, a new, unifying management standard was needed.
This technical white paper describes Redfish—a next generation management standard using a data model
representation inside a hypermedia RESTful interface. The data model is defined in terms of a standard,
machine-readable schema, with the payload of the messages expressed in JSON and the protocol using
OData v4. Because it is a hypermedia API, Redfish is capable of representing a variety of implementations by
using a consistent interface. It has mechanisms for discovering and managing data center resources,
handling events, and managing long-lived tasks.
Dell EMC is enhancing its leading Systems Management capabilities with the introduction of Redfish support
on the iDRAC with Lifecycle Controller. This technical white paper provides the required information to create
Redfish clients or use existing REST clients to deliver the benefits of the Redfish API on PowerEdge servers.
This technical white paper can also be used to help legacy management consoles support or enable the
Redfish standard.