Microsoft has provided more details on the future of its
System Center bundle of management products.
The company has yet to release System Center 2005, the first
version of the product, which bundles Microsoft Operations Manager
(MOM) 2005 and Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003 along with a
reporting service, yet corporate vice president Kirill Tatarinov
discussed the second release of the product in a speech at the
Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas.
Tatarinov's presentation repeated a lot of the information
Microsoft had given on Tuesday in a keynote presentation by Bob
Muglia, the senior vice president of the Windows Server Division.
The extra information on System Center, however, was new.
The first release of System Center, due later this year, will
add a reporting service to the combination of MOM 2005 and SMS
2003, allowing System Center to combine change and configuration
data from SMS with operational data from MOM. The second System
Center release will add state management and capacity planning as
well as a more advanced data warehouse.
Both state management and capacity planning are areas in which
management software suppliers, including Microsoft, have "under
delivered", he said.
State management would allow System Center users to define
settings - for example, which applications should run on a specific
server in a network. The system would monitor the state of the
server and whether it meets those defined settings.
Capacity planning would help users figure out what resources
they needed.
Both the state management and capacity planning features would
make extensive use of Microsoft's System Definition Model (SDM), a
modeling scheme that uses XML (Extensible Markup Language) to
describe attributes of hardware and software in an IT environment.
SDM is part of Microsoft's Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), a plan
for reducing IT complexity by improving software manageability.
SDM is extremely ambitious, said Peter Pawlak, a lead analyst at
Directions on Microsoft.
"This is very complex. People have been trying to do this for
years. It is really hard to model the reality of systems."
However, Tatarinov promised the crowd of IT managers that
Microsoft will make its vision a reality. "We will deliver," he
said. "DSI puts the centre of gravity back into IT operations. It
is about giving control back to you."
Joris Evers writes for IDG News Service