Systems management portfolio.
A decade leading UX architecture and team management for Dell's systems management software portfolio. Two products, iDRAC for the single server and OpenManage Enterprise for the fleet, held to one coherent UX across four generations of PowerEdge. The portfolio is now the systems management flavor of the ISG Design System, Dell's community-built design language.
iDRAC10 (FIG. 00, 02, 04) — Dell Info Hub, "Navigating the New iDRAC10 Interface: A User's Guide" (link). Figures 2, 3, 4 of that doc are the exact before/after pairs used here.
iDRAC9 (FIG. 01, 03) — same doc; it shows the prior UI in matched pairs. Alternatively: ITPro's iDRAC10 review by Dave Mitchell, 24 Sep 2025 (has both UIs side-by-side).
OME 4.6 (FIG. 05, 06) — Dell's OpenManage Enterprise product page and 4.6 release notes. SmartFabric topology shots are in the 4.6 "what's new" marketing materials.
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Two products, one coherent UX, four generations of hardware underneath them.
The stack is two products. iDRAC is the per-server controller, agent-less and out-of-band, on every PowerEdge. OpenManage Enterprise is the fleet console, managing thousands of servers from one browser. My work is UX architecture and team management across both, across four generations of PowerEdge (14G through 17G), with iDRAC10 shipping in September 2025 with the first complete UI reinvention in eight years.
Treat the portfolio as a design system. Not a collection of products.
Before this work, Dell's server management surfaces had drifted. iDRAC, OME, Lifecycle Controller, CloudIQ, each with its own grammar. The ISG Design System is Dell's answer, a community effort across the ISG org contributing tokens, IA principles, and interaction patterns. My team's contribution is the systems management flavor of it, and iDRAC10 is where that flavor first shipped in public.
Dell KB: KB 000348267, iDRAC10. Info Hub walkthrough: Navigating the New iDRAC10 Interface.
Eight years of IA debt. Paid down in one release.
iDRAC9, introduced in 2017, hadn't meaningfully changed in eight years. Admins were reaching around the UI, not through it. iDRAC10 is a complete redesign. Four IA shifts matter most.
IA.01Home page · text overview to health dashboard.
iDRAC9's home was a dense summary with recent logs and a ribbon menu. iDRAC10 leads with color-coded health icons for every critical subsystem. Glance-to-triage from one view.
IA.02Navigation · top ribbon to left-side expandable.
Nav moved from top ribbon to a left-hand vertical with in-place expansion. Ribbons optimize for first-visit discovery. Left nav optimizes for the 99% case of an admin returning to a known task, keeping sibling options visible.
IA.03Detail expansion · inline accordion to side panel.
iDRAC9 used an inline "+" pattern. Click plus, row expands, table reflows, context disappears. iDRAC10 uses row selection plus a persistent side panel. The table keeps its place, and it separates two actions that used to collide: selecting a row to see it versus checking a box to act on it in bulk.
IA.04Information architecture · fragmented menus to consolidated tabs.
Storage is the clearest example. iDRAC9 split controllers, physical disks, virtual disks, and enclosures across a deep menu hierarchy. iDRAC10 consolidates them into one Storage Overview with horizontal tabs. A new Environments tab does the same for cooling, temperature, and fan status.
The iDRAC9 controller hasn't seen any significant changes to its web interface for a long time... With firmware version 1.20.60.55 applied, the new iDRAC10 web interface is a very welcome update as it isn't just a refresh, but a complete redesign.
iDRAC is the depth tool. OME is the reach tool. Same design intent, different scale.
OpenManage Enterprise is the fleet console, up to 8,000 devices under full management and 25,000 in monitoring-only mode, in one browser. The design problem is the inverse of iDRAC's. iDRAC has to give you everything about one machine without drowning you. OME has to give you the shape of thousands without reducing them to a number. 4.6 added a SmartFabric topology view, native Apache Kafka, a rebased SLES 15 SP6 appliance, and new deployment targets (Proxmox, Nutanix AHV, OpenShift).
The framework is extending. The portfolio is cohering.
ITPro reviewed iDRAC10 as a complete redesign, not a refresh. The more interesting signal internally is that agentic AI for systems management plugs into the same IA and the same design tokens. The flavor isn't just carrying visual cohesion, it's the substrate the next generation is being built on.