Microsoft Grows Its Grand Plan

The technique Microsoft and EMC hope will propel them to the top of the IT management ladder could take on a life of its own, analysts say. If it does, end users may achieve a bit of the combined heterogeneous system, storage, and network management capabilities that have proven so elusive in the past.

Let's start at the top: As part of this week's Microsoft Management Summit confab in San Diego, Redmond released new versions of its key management platforms. The highlights:

The SML that's debuted in the new Operations Manager is a language for modeling networks, applications, servers, and storage devices to the management system. This means that any vendor's wares can be incorporated for management by the Operations Manager, providing the same SML is used to define them.

Take EMC, for instance: Its Smarts software now has a bidirectional adapter to feed information into the Operations Manager. (See Microsoft Calls on EMC Smarts .) (Previously, Smarts could only accept data from Microsoft's MOM and use it to create reports on overall performance.)

Microsoft and EMC, along with CA, Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, and Sun, have submitted SML to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for standardization. SML uses extensible markup language (XML) to create the models needed for management, hence the outreach to W3C. At the same time, though, there's talk that SML has also been designed with standards like the DMTF's Web Services for Management (WS-Management) specification announced last year.And guess who the DMTF works with? SNIA, that's who.

Despite the justifiable skepticism standards like this usually call forth, sources think SML is different, even if only that it lends other management standards a piece they've been missing. "DMTF was a bit too open, there were too many interpretations," says Nelson Ruest, senior enterprise IT architect with Resolutions Enterprises Ltd., a consultancy based in Victoria, B.C. "But with SML, you have one single tool." He says the spec is interoperable, supported by other standards bodies, and will work with operating systems other than Windows.

Another observer thinks SML will help draw other work together. "No one standard is the panacea, but as organizations and management vendors start putting them together, it's a good thing," says analyst Andi Mann of Enterprise Management Associates.

Mann notes that even though Microsoft is far from its goal of autonomic management, it's building the groundwork with critical path analysis, which enables the management system to determine how upper-level transactions and business services are affected by lower-level alarms.

Case in point: One customer of both Smarts and Microsoft MOM is using the new Operations Manager (and testing the bidirectional Smarts adapter) to tag performance levels for specific applications."Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 gave us a view into our server performance, but we wanted more," says Rodney Orange, supervisor of the Wintel server engineering team at Carnival Cruise Lines, in a prepared statement. "We turned to Operations Manager 2007 for service-level monitoring to understand how our services are performing -- and where the bottlenecks are."

Instead of simply reporting distinct failures among the company's 800-odd Exchange servers, the console warns of performance problems in applications like ship-to-shore email, line-of-business applications such as SQL Server and Active Directory Services, or e-commerce apps on the company's Website.

No one contacted for this article thinks Microsoft and its SML are anywhere near achieving autonomic IT management. Indeed, Andi Mann thinks Microsoft isn't as heterogeneous in its management approach as CA, HP, or IBM. But SML and support from the likes of Cisco and EMC could contribute toward better management systems in the future. If it catches on, SML's benefits could extend to Microsoft's partners as well.

Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch