Here We Go Again

4:50 PM -- The dog days of summer are a dangerous time for any marketeer. It's too early to announce something really interesting, yet it's just the right time to sow some messaging for the fall conferences.

Enter Microsoft, which today revealed that it's joining up with other tech suppliers to create something called Service Modeling Language (SML) -- an XML-based "common language for expressing information about IT resources and services," including storage ones. The goal? (drumroll...) Interoperability of data management software!

Microsoft has no spec, but a draft has been cobbled together (along with the requisite quotes of support) from BEA, BMC, Cisco, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, and Sun. The group plans to unite soon and send their draft to a standards body for ratification.

Is your head tipping ever so slightly forward, as your eyelids droop? Perhaps a thin line of drool is starting to snake down your chin.

Get out that hankie. It may be worthwhile to stay awake. First of all, it's Microsoft, so we have to listen, however reluctantly. Second, this new technique just might make life easier for some of you in the end.Here's why: SML is a re-jiggered version of Microsoft's Systems Definition Model, something the vendor announced years ago to assist developers with writing code for applications that manage its systems. So work has already been done, right?

In this new form, SDM is supposed to simplify the work of porting Windows-based management applications to other operating systems, like Linux. At the same time, Microsoft's more obvious motivation is to ease the porting of management programs written for Linux and other environments to Windows.

For anyone with an eye to expanding their Windows-based data center and storage infrastructure, the thought's a nice one.

Now you know what to ask about at all the fall confabs.

Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch