Microsoft expands on plan to simplify data center

IDG News Service - Microsoft Corp. will soon begin delivering software components for a new initiative aimed at reducing data center complexity and making it easier for companies to deploy and manage applications across large groups of servers, the company said yesterday.
Dubbed the Dynamic Systems Initiative, the project aims to alleviate what Microsoft views as a "crisis in the data center," said Bob O'Brien, group product manager of Microsoft's Windows Server division. IT managers face a profusion of data, devices, applications and personnel and need technology that will help them integrate and run their intricate environments, he said.
Microsoft's project centers on a software architecture specification for developers that aims to make applications more flexible and self-descriptive. The first deliverable based on the initiative, according to O'Brien, will be Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 software, due out April 24. Other components will roll out over the next several years, with at least one more piece scheduled to arrive before the end of 2003.
Microsoft spoke about the program briefly last month during a presentation at its Silicon Valley campus (see story). Further details of the initiative are scheduled to be discussed next week at the company's annual Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas.
Microsoft has developed a specification it calls the System Definition Model, which is an XML-based blueprint for building functionality into applications that will allow them to describe their own operational requirements. If an application can describe its own deployment, resource and security requirements, it can be more easily and flexibly managed, O'Brien said.
Microsoft has been working closely with a number of hardware, software and services partners on its Dynamic Systems Initiative, including Computer Associates International Inc., Electronic Data Systems Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Computer Corp., O'Brien said.
Absent from that list are Sun Microsystems Inc. and IBM, each of which is working on its own heavily hyped initiative for addressing computing complexity.
But Microsoft's approach to the problem is unique and likely to pay off for customers more quickly than projects from other vendors, said Tom Bittman, an analyst at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn.
"[Microsoft is] a little late, but they're also coming at it from a different way. They're approaching this from an inside-out perspective, focusing on the applications first," he said. "Microsoft is trying to add value to Windows, IBM is trying to add value to the IBM software/hardware stack, and Sun is saying, 'Me too.'"
Windows Server 2003 will include several features developed as part of the Dynamic Systems Initiative, O'Brien said. Most of those