It was a push and upgrade since there has been an industry wide move towards the IPMI (research Intel for IPMI 1.0-2.0 standards) The card incorporated a java based webserver not requiring a specific client code. It originally was known to work only on IE with JRE >1.4 installed but now supports Mozilla. I've even seen it work on Safari within OS X 10.3.

The hardware involved was a drastic change. The main chipset was based off of Agilant vs. AMI and monitoring capabilities got much more complex. There exists a perl module to easily interface your own Nagios monitoring scripts into:
http://lanceerplaats.nl/PowerEdge/RAC/

The author includes great documentation along with some scripts to get RRDTOOL graphs setup to monitor sensors on the BMC.

This card also included an RJ45 port, AC adapter, and PCMCIA slot for modem and incorporated many of the features the DRAC II card offered.

A note to anyone with a 1650. By stock, Dell shipped the 1G824 part (2x64Mhz 66Bit) riser card with a 1650. Because of the lack of 64bit support on the 1650 (Dual P3 Tualatin vs. Dual P4 Xeon) the DRAC III card required the 1G825 Riser card (1x64bit-66mhz and 1x32bit-33mhz) to function properly.

The ERA/O option was a daughterboard offered with the 1650 and 2650 (1u and 2u, respectively) servers. Instead of wasting a riser spot on the PCI backplane, the daughterboard fit nicely into its spot and used a builtin 100Mb connector found on each of these servers. The port is unused if this card is not there. It offered similar features (minus the modem and external AC adapter) as the DRAC III card. I've managed to add one into a system that did not originally ship with the card, but success will vary here.

Dell Documentation: http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/software/smdrac3/drac3/index.htm
atr