"Avodart" recently posted a comment to an entry on DSI dated 12/12/07. The comment read:

Suppose this application needed to be deployed. If your application contains the knowledge about its dependencies, that part of the model could be consumed by Systems Configuration Manager to find servers that met those requirements. If the knowledge about how your application needed to be installed was in the model, if could be deployed too, configured and monitored. With knowledge of the applications performance over time, it should be possible to perform capacity planning calculations and predict when bottlenecks will occur.
Sounds far fetched? Not really a lot of what i talked about is possible today if you do-it-yourself. What DSI does is do-it-for-you, or at least it provides the tools, OSes and management tools that enable it.

The comment referred to using models in ConfigMgr for ease of deployment. The model would have the intelligence to determine what the requirements were for using this application and deploying it only to those systems that met the requirements. Now this is COOL.

Models - and DSI - are already being used in Operations Manager 2007. Remember from the DSI article that "Operations Manager uses the application knowledge captured in management packs to simplify identifying issues and their root causes, facilitating resolution and restoring services or preventing potential outages, and providing intelligent management at the system level."

All hardware, software, services and other logical components are described to OpsMgr using a model. That model is a representation of the components, capturing the nature of those components and the relationships between then. OpsMgr uses management packs to model and monitor software and hardware components.

Model-based design allows service-level monitoring rather than just computer-based or hardware-based monioring. The objects in the model can represent either hardware or software components. OpsMgr includes the capability to create distributed application models, which combine different objects and relationships to span different components, applications, and hardware. That in fact is one of the new capabilities in OpsMgr 2007, and makes it possible to provide end-to-end montoring.

Model-based design is discussed at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb977443.aspx.