Managing Data Centers Through XML

Computerworld - Last fall, some 40 management tool vendors formed the DCML Organization, a consortium committed to developing an open standard to facilitate interoperability and better integration between tools. Vendors say the the evolving Data Center Markup Language will be critical to the development of utility computing and simplify life for data center managers. The first release of DCML is scheduled this quarter, with products adapted to the specification expected by midyear.
One of the leaders of the effort is Tim Howes, chief technology officer at Opsware Inc., a data center software automation vendor in Sunnyvale, Calif. He discussed the motivations for developing DCML and its technical challenges and potential user benefits with reporter Patrick Thibodeau.

What problem is the DCML Organization trying to solve? Over the past five to eight years, there has been a tremendous explosion of complexity in the data center. The problem is that the traditional management tools haven't kept up with that explosion. You have something doing monitoring, for instance, that needs to communicate with something doing provisioning.
Think back 10 years ago. There were relatively few servers in the data center. Those servers were relatively large, and they were running a relatively small number of applications, maybe in the dozens. Today, there are literally thousands of servers in data centers, as well as hundreds or thousands of applications running across those servers. The complexity of managing that has just gotten out of hand.

Where are existing management tools falling short? It's not so much that they are falling short. The problem is that no one company writes data center management software that solves the entire problem. Even if there were such a company, would you really want to put all your eggs in that basket?

Where does DCML fit in? There's a need to have all these management products communicate with one another, and that's what DCML is about -- providing a common data format for exchanging information about the environment being managed between all of these different management systems.

Can you give an example of how that would work? When you provision a new machine, you want to make sure that machine is monitored, so you need to communicate to your monitoring system that there's a new machine to be monitored. Today that happens, if you are lucky, by somebody leaving a Post-it note on the monitor of the guy who runs the monitoring system. But DCML allows that to happen in a more automated fashion. Similarly, that happens with security systems, backup systems --