Appliance Deployment Featured Article

What are some of the best smart services to help developers build out the best solutions possible?

Mike Slattery, director of software development at NEI, recently sat down for a podcast interview with TMCnet Web editor Marisa Torrieri, with more than just the answer.

In 2009, NEI announced new enhancements to its Element Manager 3.0, which now includes enhanced smart services for software developers. Slattery discussed how these smart services help developers build secure, hardened solutions that deliver on the promise of low-lifecycle maintenance.

Talking about some of the Element Manager's more important features, Slattery said he tends to group the features into four different categories: "One of the important things to realize is that the product is targeted both at the end user and the software vendor themselves."

The first three categories are really focused on the end user, he said. "The first is our core capabilities of health, update, backup, or 'HUB' as we refer to them. The second is the OS extraction features, and the third is what I call our 'ease of use' functions."

Slattery explained that those functions are what really make an appliance simple to operate. "In the Element Manager 3.0, we released a feature called the Task Scheduler. All of the routine maintenance activities, from archiving to backing up to deleting files, can be completely automated and scheduled."

It's the fourth feature group that's really targeted towards the software vendor, he said, "our ease of use, integration capabilities. The end user really wants a seamless experience, and what that requires is our element manager to be tightly integrated with the application. We have some customization tools and various interfaces that make it easy for the two applications to function seamlessly, so that they appear to be, to the end user, a tightly-integrated, overall product."

And yet, Slattery explained, the vendor does not have to actually develop all those management capabilities that come with the Element Manager."