Dynamic System Initiative

In May 2004 we did a story on managing the lifecycle of IT

assets, including software, hardware, information and services. The story looked

at each category individually and talked about them as discrete pieces. Though

we thought of linking them together so that organizations can manage their IT

systems as a single unit, there were no such solutions available at that time.

DSI (Dynamic System Initiative), an industry effort led by microsoft, is an

endeavor in that direction. This talks about not only individual components but

also a complete application system, including soft- ware, hardware, storage and

network, and looks at it from the perspective of operations, including

development and deployment of such systems.

In today's IT environments the definition of an application

has evolved to include much more than just the soft- ware. So, it is imperative

that application development and operation should change its focus from a single

system or node to include the entire system. However, typically, application

development models focus on individual applications or nodes and developers do

not exactly know the actual deployment environment. This creates problems during

deployment, when the underlying infrastructure starts demanding changes in the

original application, thus increasing costs. In most applications, a major part

of the budget and effort goes in operating the system. Overtime, changes in

hardware infrastructure or requirements necessitate multiple iterations of the

application with the development team to optimize the system. This leads to

changes in the initial specification of the application and further increases

costs. These issues require a greater attention to be paid to the entire system,

including application and related operational requirements, such as topology,

configuration settings and hardware re- sources, right from the design and

development stage.

DSI addresses exactly these concerns by creating a

connection from the design of a system to the operation of that system on

through to the end users using that system. At the core of the initiative is the

SDM (System Definition Model), which provides integration across application-development tools, OSs,

applications, hardware and management tools. SDM is a language or meta-model

that is used to create models of a DSI system. SDM is used to define system

elements and to capture data pertinent to development, deployment and operations

of a system, making the model relevant to the entire life of the system. The

three essential parts of DSI and how SDM provides solutions for them are:

Design: Development tools following SDM help in

modeling a system composed of software and hardware resources. The model

contains information necessary to deploy and operate an application, including

required resources, con- figuration, operational features and policies.

Deployment: The SDM definition created at design

time is used to automatically deploy the system by dynamically allocating and

configuring software and hard- ware resources, such as server, storage and

network. A system can be deployed to different environments and to different

scales.

Operations: For operations there is an SDM service,

which is responsible for maintaining the designed SDM model. It provides a

system-level view that can be used for managing the system based on the model.

This view enables new management tools to drive re- source allocation,

configuration management, upgrades and process automation from the perspective

of the system.

A typical business application system consists of different layers of hardware and software

Most business applications are tightly coupled with the

deployment system and the biggest challenge is to run the same application on

different deployment scenarios or to different scales. Deployment involves

allocation of new resources such as application hosts (servers, storage, etc),

network hardware and OSs. All these are critical layers of any application

system but are typically defined independently and by different teams working on

the system. SDM allows modeling of individual layers of the entire sys- tem,

including the application, hosts and network, and provides for provisioning of

resources automatically depending upon the deployment scenario and scale of the

application.

Layering is accomplished when systems in one layer define a

set of constraints on systems in another layer and vice versa. Additionally, it

is the responsibility of the SDM service to maintain the designed system

throughout the operational lifecycle of the application. With this layering

model, which divides the entire system into discrete units, and the ability to

enforce constraints across these layers, products supporting SDM enable

organizations to separate management at each layer while maintaining policies

and constraints across the entire system. This way different teams can continue

to work on individual layers independently by just keeping in mind the

constraints put in by the other layers.

DSI promises to make application development. Deployment

and operation easier and more efficient by providing an integrated approach,

which not only talks of software but also about all elements that go into making

a business application run. But beware, DSI is being led by Microsoft, so it

invariably will be tied closely to the Windows platform, leaving other platforms

with no solution or with small hook ups to connect to the overall primarily

Windows platform. Presently, various companies such as Centratta, Computer

Associates, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, HP, NEC and Opsware Inc are a part

of the initiative. These companies have integrated their products with

Microsoft's Auto- mated Deployment Services and other server products for better

system provisioning and improved server manageability. As of now tools and

solutions that implement DSI across a system are not available from any vendor.

However, various current solutions from Microsoft do pro- vide a near-DSI

solution. Products such as Windows Server 2003, Systems Management Server, MS

Operations Manager, MS Virtual Server2005 and visual Studio.NET provide the

capability to create a DSI system partly, but real DSI implementations can only

happen when the next-generation products such as LonghomVisual Studio 2005 and

MS SQL Server 2005 come out in the market.

Anoop Mangla