Microsoft Monday said it was working with a set of partners to create a standard modeling language designed to help corporations better manage their infrastructure.
Microsoft and its partners released the draft specification of the Service Modeling Language (SML), which is supported by management heavyweights IBM and HP among others, and is based on Microsoft’s System Definition Model (SDM).
Management stalwart CA was conspicuously absent from the list of supporters, but Microsoft officials said they are confident CA will join the effort, which is also supported by BEA, BMC, Cisco, Dell, EMC, Intel and Sun.
Microsoft and its partners hope to submit the specification to a standards body by year-end and hope for ratification sometime during 2007. Microsoft and its partners did not say which standards body it would target.
The WS-Management specification, however, which would serve as a transport mechanism for SML data, was submitted in 2005 to the Distributed Management Task Force. The specification was co-authored by Microsoft, AMD, BMC, CA, Dell, Fujitsu, Intel, NEC, Novell, Sun and Symantec.
SDM was first introduced in 2003 as the cornerstone to Microsoft’s Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), a 10-year plan to create a comprehensive management platform for Windows.
SDM is key to DSI and is defined by XML-based documents that are embedded into applications or network resources so they can communicate management and operational needs to the network.
Developers can use SDM to embed modeling information in applications, devices and services such as configuration and security policies associated with their operation. IT can use the models to monitor such things as health, service levels, availability and capacity.
Microsoft said SML-based resource models would essentially become a set of reusable building blocks that can be applied to specific services, therefore eliminating the need to write custom models for every node on the network.
While experts have validated Microsoft’s DSI concept, they also have said that Microsoft must turn SDM over to a standards body for it to blossom beyond a Windows-centric management technique.
“Today effectively SDM comes to fruition,” says Kirill Tatarinov, corporate vice president of the Windows and enterprise management division at Microsoft. “[Standardization] will help our customers and all the vendors and developers to do a much better job defining computer resources and making sure systems interoperate from the management side, the development side, and the operations side.”
Working with Microsoft Some of the industry’s biggest names are teaming with Microsoft to standardize a management modeling language. They include: | ||||||||||
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Microsoft said in April that it was working on Version 3 of SDM and that was the version it hoped to get its partners to rally around. Indeed that is the case as SDM 3.0 is the version that is at the foundation of SML, according to Microsoft’s Tatarinov.
“This is important for the industry because I think we have all struggled with the complexity of IT data center issues and we all realize that adding standards to remove complexity for our customers is of paramount importance,” said Rick Telford, IBM’s vice president of autonomic computing. “With SML, much like a programming language defines programs, SML will give us a common way to define [management] models.”
Microsoft has already built early versions of SDM into software such as Visual Studio development tools. Version 3.0 of SDM will be supported in forthcoming versions of Microsoft Operations Manager, System Management Server, System Center Service Desk, Longhorn Server and Visual Studio.
Microsoft plans to SDM-enable all its infrastructure software, including the operating system, so that SDM management models can be used to repair, troubleshoot and report on network health.
