If you need to manage your hardware remotely, you should know that the Taiwanese Asus launches its IPMI Expansion Card. It’s a dedicated card allowing to bring IPMI functions to your system or workstation.
IPMI Expansion Card: a dedicated card from Asus!
Overall, we find a small card with a PCIe 3.0 x1 interface and an ASPEED AST2600A3 chip. The latter is not very bulky, as we can see, it comes in a half-height format.
Despite everything, it has a rather rich connectivity based on VGA and Ethernet 1 GbE on the bracket. These interfaces will be used to provide a basic display and control of your machine via the network.
Otherwise, we can see a number of fan sockets, 8 in total. That’s not all, as there are also USB, panel (power/reset), BMC, SPI and PM_BUS header. All this will be used to drive your system. Finally, to properly power your card, a 6-pin PCIe is required.
Finally, the remote management will be done via a web console or a Linux tool. From then on, it will be possible to do remote monitoring (temperatures, voltages, etc.). The same goes for hardware management with bios/BMC updates or ventilation management, etc.
Finally, we are curious to know the selling price of such a card, as it is not known.
