Nobody decides to pursue a career in IT because they find systems management
fascinating. That's what a Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) MVP recently
told me. And yet, IT professionals' highest priority, according to Windows
IT Pro's 2006 Industry Trends survey, is "managing IT infrastructure," and
their biggest pain point is "limited budgets and expanding responsibilities."
Systems management may not be sexy, but it nevertheless consumes a huge amount
of IT energy and effort—not to mention 70 percent of IT budgets.
And Microsoft hasn't failed to note that all the work of maintaining a functioning
infrastructure not only detracts from IT's ability to innovate and deploy new
technologies but also presents an opportunity for competitors to lure IT away
from Windows. The company is sharply focused on the fact that its competitive
advantage hinges on continuously simplifying and unifying the management experience
throughout the Windows environment (i.e., Microsoft OSs and applications such
as SQL Server, Exchange Server, IIS, and Office). The Dynamic Systems Initiative
(DSI) is Microsoft's company-wide strategy to attack the management problem
end to end, from application development to IT to end users. DSI aims to unite
IT and corporate developers in creating operationally aware applications that
capture IT knowledge and incorporate health models that facilitate troubleshooting
and maintenance.
A year ago, I talked with Microsoft Corporate Vice President Kirill Tatarinov
about DSI and his Windows Enterprise Management Division's (WEMD's) System Center
products, which were being developed with the vision of bringing DSI to life
by enabling self-managing dynamic systems ("Radically Simplify IT," April 2006,
InstantDoc ID 49503.) This year, as the latest version of System Center products
begin to reach the market, I again spoke with Tatarinov, as well as System Center
General Manager of Marketing Larry Orecklin, to discuss the products and how
they address your priorities and pain points.
DSI Progress
Forster:What would you say are the two most important
DSI developments in the past year?
Tatarinov: We worked closely with the industry to take their feedback
and fine-tune the strategy and initiative. A couple things happened: One is
standards-related. DSI revolves around the very important concept of applications
that are "designed for operations." But we have a robust hardware partner ecosystem,
including networking vendors, storage vendors, and ISVs. Unless we have a standard
that enables people to define their systems using a language that all the partners
can understand, we won't be able to fulfill the "designed for operations" dream.
One of the biggest realizations we had about DSI is that the language for expressing
system constraints and the meta-model needs to be standard. That was the driver
for turning our proprietary SDM [System Definition Model] into the published
specification called SML [Service Modeling Language].
Orecklin: SML is how you describe an IT service, the components in that
service, and the relationships between those. Customers' environments are increasingly
heterogeneous. When we thought about how our SDM model compares with other initiatives
in the industry, we worked with more than ten industry leaders to form the SML
Working Group, which has SDM at its core. Since the initial announcement, many
more are looking to join.
Tatarinov: IBM, Cisco, EMC, HP, and others are helping take the original
specification to the next level, and in the next three to four months, hopefully,
make it the industry standard.
Orecklin: There's also an industry initiative
called the Configuration Management Database [CMDB] Federation Consortium. CMDB
helps define and catalog all [IT] assets and
components and the state of those assets. We
joined that group and are working with them to
adopt SML as the core language and modeling
infrastructure.
From a designed-for-operations perspective, standards is the key technical
movement. All our products are leveraging this common model infrastructure as
a way to describe and capture the knowledge that exists all the way from the
developer through to the end users. It's incorporated in Visual Studio [VS}.
It's a core part of the System Center portfolio.
Forster: You mentioned two key results that came from
industry input. The first was the standards you just discussed. What was the
second?
Tatarinov: The second is fine-tuning DSI by considering a
new persona: the business architect. This concept originates with feedback we
got from industry analysts. This persona thinks about the connection of business
and IT. So now DSI addresses the developer, IT professional, and business architect
to provide the CIO an enterprise governance view.
How do you define the ecosystem and the collection of tools that will plug
in together and deliver complete umbrella-style management so that the CIO would
be able to understand and see a concrete set of reports that span project management,
asset allocation, governance and compliance, traditional IT infrastructure management,
and development aspects all coming together? The business architect persona
fulfills the CIO's dream in that scenario.
Forster: What's the purpose of these personas in relation
to DSI?
Tatarinov: DSI works by connecting several products that fulfill
an individual persona's needs. The VS brand is for developers and architects.
System Center is for IT managers. Microsoft Project and Microsoft Office are
for business architects. The connection happens through standard interfaces,
standard schemas and models, and point-to-point connectors that are being built.
We also define very crisp scenarios for how those connections work. A simple
scenario: I'm the developer. I built the system. The system automatically gets
provisioned and goes into operations. When operations sees an alert, that alert
is automatically mapped back to the developer environment and gets logged as
a bug for the developer who built this system. Then the bug can be corrected,
and the fix automatically finds its way back into production.