Microsoft says DSI roll out under way

SAN DIEGO – Microsoft Tuesday began rolling out the first pieces of its integrated management infrastructure and said the bulk of the platform will be delivered over the next 12 months.

The announcements came on the first day of the Microsoft Management Summit, where the company also said it would license network management technology from EMC to add to its System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2007. Microsoft also said that SCOM would ship on April 1.

Microsoft also announced it would partner with EMC and Cisco to develop standardized modeling technologies that would work across network systems and applications.

To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

SAN DIEGO – Microsoft Tuesday began rolling out the first pieces of its integrated management infrastructure and said the bulk of the platform will be delivered over the next 12 months.

The announcements came on the first day of the Microsoft Management Summit, where the company also said it would license network management technology from EMC to add to its System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2007. Microsoft also said that SCOM would ship on April 1.

Microsoft also announced it would partner with EMC and Cisco to develop standardized modeling technologies that would work across network systems and applications.

Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the server and tools business at Microsoft, said it all adds up to the fact that the company is finally set to deliver the tools to implement its Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), a 10-year initiative begun in 2003 with the goal of creating a Windows management platform.

“We are delivering on DSI in a big way in 2007,” said Muglia during his keynote to 3,500 attendees. “This year I am here to tell you DSI becomes real.”

Muglia also signaled the end of Microsoft’s proprietary System Definition Model (SDM), a linchpin for DSI’s modeling capabilities, in favor of the Service Modeling Language (SML). Microsoft developed SML, which is based on SDM 3.0, with a host of partners including BEA, BMC, CA, Cisco, EMC, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, and Sun.

Last week, the group sent SML to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for standardization.

The bulk of the DSI delivery is tied up in the company’s System Center family of tools.

The first step will be next week’s delivery of SCOM, which was formerly called Microsoft Operations Manager.

This spring, the company will deliver Service Pack 3 of Systems Management Server (SMS), which includes the AssetMetrix asset management capabilities, and follow that up in September with the shipment of System Center Configuration Manager 2007, which is the next version of SMS.

In the next 30 days, Microsoft will deliver the first public beta of System Center Service Manager (formerly called Service Desk). In the next 45 days, Microsoft will ship Beta 2 of Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2.0 and Beta 2 of Virtual Machine Manager (VMM).

The final versions of DPM 2007 and VMM 2007 are slated to ship in September.

At the end of the year, Microsoft is slated to ship Longhorn Server, and in the first half of 2008 add the final version of Service Manager and Longhorn's hypervisor virtualization technology code named Viridian.

The next version of Visual Studio, code-name Orcas, is expected to ship in late 2007 or early 2008.

All the software will support SML, according to Kirill Tatarinov, corporate vice president of the Windows enterprise management division at Microsoft.

SML serves as a foundation to build models that systems, such as storage, and applications use to define their optimum health and operational needs and communicate that data to the network.

Microsoft also said partnerships would be key to realizing the integration of management tools and developing standards