Have you ever been working and had a patch come down from your IT department that you had to install now. Or how about a virus scan that brought your machine to a crawl in the middle of your work. If so, then you may want AMT Alarm Clock, a new feature in the recently released 5.1 version of Intel Active Management Technology (AMT).

This feature provides the ability for a remote management console to schedule clients to wake up from any sleep state (even off) at a specific date/time or on a recurring basis. And the wake can occur even if the system does not have network connectivity (which distinguishes this feature from WOL or AMT's existing remote power control).

With this new feature you can:

• Allow autonomous tasks to run at scheduled times


• Improve productivity and compliance by scheduling compute tasks for off hours


• Save network bandwidth when waking many machines

Once the system is awake a local agent can perform a scheduled task. The tasks to perform can be communicated to the agent in advance, or can be written to the 3rd Party Data Store for reading when the system is powered up by the Alarm Clock.

When the AMT Alarm Clock wakes the system it writes an entry to the event log stating that the system was powered up by AMT and indicates the prior sleep state of the system. The local agent can read this entry to find out which sleep state to return the system when it is finished with its tasks.

Keep in mind that the AMT Management Engine (ME) must have a power policy set that will have it on when the alarm is supposed to run. For example, if the ME is only configured to be on in S3 it won't be available to wake the system from S5.

To find out more please check out the samples and documentation in the 5.1 release of the the AMT SDK. There are C# WS-Man and C++ EOI/SOAP samples available.

Brrrriiiiiiiinnnggg! Wake up AMT Developers and let us know what you think of the new AMT Alarm Clock.