Large or small, companies are faced with managing networks that, thanks to dropping hardware prices, are forever growing in size and complexity. Steve Rokov, marketing director for Avocent's embedded software and solutions group, spreads the word about two emerging standards that can make life easier for network engineers charged with managing networks and maintaining availability of network resources.

What is agentless technology, and why is it suddenly in the limelight?
Steve Rokov: Agentless technology complements traditional network management platforms by covering gaps in the management process. For example, traditional network management software runs on top of the operating system [OS], making it reliant on the OS being up and running in order to work. But what happens when the OS is the problem in a failed remote server? It makes the management software useless. Enter agentless. Agentless is special software that runs within a system, completely separate from the system's CPU, OS, etc. Because it doesn't rely on the CPU or OS to run, it can offer network management capabilities to recover a remote server that has an OS hiccup. Basically, agentless fills the gaps left with traditional network management software.

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