DCML (Data Center Markup Language)
DCML is a proposed XML-based standard for describing the various components running in a data center and how those components interoperate.
The proposed DCML standard will provide an inventory of data-center elements, describe how those pieces interoperate and define the various policies that bind them together.
It encompasses a range of data-center gear, including network and storage components; software infrastructure and applications; and Unix, Linux, Windows and other servers.
With this information tied together, companies will be able to more easily reproduce, rebuild or re-provision any portion of their data-center environment, Andreessen said.
Users will be able to automate time-consuming processes such as deploying, upgrading and patching servers. Also, for disaster-recovery purposes, DCML can be used as a blueprint to reproduce a complete data-center infrastructure - including component dependencies, device configurations, operational rules and management processes.
Further, DCML will provide a foundation to enable utility computing, its backers say.
Linking existing IT management systems is a prerequisite to achieving the much touted but still elusive vision of a utility-computing infrastructure made up of self-healing, self-managing, self-protecting and self-provisioning systems.
"A real-time infrastructure requires an integration platform to give IT managers visualization of the components and the service, and to help them automate the process," says Donna Scott, a research director with Gartner.
She says enabling the islands of network, servers, storage and applications to share data will help companies implement a higher-level and more-automated means to manage data centers.
Backers include EDS and Opsware. IBM, Microsoft and Sun, however, have not signed onto the proposal, at least as of 10/20/03.
From Group tries to steer utility computing, Network World, 10/20/03.
Additional resources
DCML Organization
Vendor group; site has background information on DCML.
Utility computing research center
Latest news, analysis and resource links from Network World Fusion.
Comments:
DCML won't succeed with RDF
by Charlie Betz
DCML has chosen to base itself on RDF, an unproven Semantic Web standard that may be problematic in actual enterprise implementations. It will require architects and engineers to grasp an entirely new data management paradigm, query semantics, and more, neither relational nor object-oriented. This is not a recipe for success.
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