A.05.80 HP Insight Remote Support Advanced and Remote Device Access Security Overview (October 2012)

Chapter 2
HP Insight Remote Support Advanced
This chapter provides an overview of the security features available in HP Insight Remote Support
Advanced. Insight Remote Support Advanced is designed to collect reactive and proactive event data
from servers and storage devices using the various network protocols described in this paper. Insight
Remote Support Advanced provides the core device level communication means for gathering data, while
HP Systems Insight Manager (HP SIM) and HP System Management Homepage (HP SMH) provide
device discovery, security, and user interface hosting services.
Because the Insight Remote Support Advanced user interface is directly accessible through the Systems
Insight Manager user interface and utilizes many of HP SIM’s features including security, several sections
that follow were directly extracted from the Systems Insight Manager Security White Paper. In addition,
lower level details regarding encryption ciphers, certificate management, and host security are available in
security technical references.
Insight Remote Support Advanced is composed of three parts:
l Remote Hardware Event Management
Diagnostic software monitors the status of your hardware and generates notification events when error
conditions are detected for supported servers, connected peripherals, and storage devices connected
to supported systems. Notification events are received and analyzed by monitoring software installed
on the Central Management Server (CMS) at the customer site and if necessary the event will be
forwarded to HP for further analysis, review and possible support action. This capability can help
identify potential critical issues before they occur and prevent them, increasing your system uptime.
Automated notification decreases downtime for unexpected outages by automatically notifying HP of
failures as they are detected. This results in faster response times, better and more accurate failure
descriptions and shorter downtime.
l Remote Data Collection and Proactive Services
This is an option available in addition to the remote device monitoring. It collects system information
and logs so that proactive assessments can be made by HP support. Assessments can include
system health-checks, current patching levels, system audits, and system availability reports. By
using the proactive assessments, HP can help customers manage their IT environment and increase
the overall availability of their enterprise. Remote data collection does not collect any business data,
but like remote device monitoring, it may contain configuration information such as IP addresses,
system details, as well as system administrator contact information. As such, the same industry
standard techniques (for example, SNMP, WBEM, DCOM, HTTP, HTTPS, SSH, and FTP) that are
used in the remote device monitoring are applied for remote data collection.
l Remote Device Access
Remote Device Access allows highly trained HP support personnel direct access to the systems and
devices under support. This can significantly reduce the time needed to troubleshoot an issue and
restore the system/device to production status.
Note: This function operates independently from Insight Remote Support Advanced.
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