"Conversely, Intel is heavily promoting what it calls "active management technology" (AMT) in the new chips as a major plus for system..."

"...administrators and enterprise IT. Understood to be a sub-operating system residing in the chip's firmware, AMT will allow administrators to both monitor or control individual machines independent of an operating system.

Additionally, AMT also features what Intel calls "IDE redirection" which will allow administrators to remotely enable, disable or format or configure individual drives and reload operating systems and software from remote locations, again independent of operating systems. Both AMT and IDE control are enabled by a new network interface controller."

In an Intel AMT-enabled system, remote, or out-of-band (OOB), management is enabled via two technologies.

Keyboard and text redirection is called serial over local area network (serial over LAN). Full CD and/or floppy redirection is called integrated device electronics (IDE) redirection.

Both redirection technologies let technicians at the help desk remotely run management utilities and fix a range of problems over the wire. Coupled with Intel AMT alerting features (refer to the next section), serial over LAN and IDE redirection can produce significant savings in downtime caused by platform problems that currently require desk-side or depot repairs.

For example, Intel discovered that many of the trouble tickets for PCs required desk-side visits for problems that could have been eliminated or resolved using Intel AMT. Coupled with the fact that down-the-wire solutions can be up to four times faster than desk-side visits, this can translate into annual savings in an IT organization of many millions of dollars.

One of the reasons problem resolution is so costly today is that end users do not always recognize the severity of problems that occur on their systems. Well-meaning users often try to make their own repairs, but sometimes worsen problems and increase the time it takes to recover. And, “shot-in-the-dark” remedies such as blind system reboots, unnecessary software reinstalls, and other time-consuming workarounds often fail to resolve the root problem and can produce further issues that lead to repeated outages. The result is delayed problem resolution on top of lost productive time.

quoted from the article at http://www.digitmag.co.uk