Open Platform Management Architecture - History

History

OPMA was created as a joint technology development effort between AMD and various platform management subsystem technology companies such as Agilent, AMI, Avocent, and Raritan Embedded Solutions (formerly called Peppercon). When OPMA was first released in February 2005, platform hardware management was being treated as a value added feature by OEMs. This resulted in a constant redesign of the management card infrastructure such that no two motherboard manufacturers could use the same card. Lack of standards and constant redesign resulted in higher end user costs. While PCI based management cards were available which could be plugged into a variety of platforms, the PCI bus did not provide direct access to all of the sensors needed to manage the hardware aspects of a platform. To gain full sensor access, custom headers had to be added to motherboards. Custom cables then linked these sideband signals between the card and the motherboard. PCI based platform management cards also consume a PCI slot which is a premium resource for many servers. This is especially true of those using the 1U rack format and those which need PCI slots for RAID interface cards that enhance system hard disk throughput.

AMD engineering teams were internally tasked with building server reference designs to support Opteron server processor evaluation by customers. During these early internal server design efforts it was determined that a standard management card subsystem that was reusable across many platforms would decrease time to market while saving design and support costs for AMD reference design platforms in the field. Such an interface would also allow AMD to outsource the design and test of the management card to industry experts. AMD reasoned that external audiences would derive these same benefits as its internal engineering teams and so OPMA was documented and released.