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Q1: What is the Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI)?
DSI is a Microsoft-led, industry effort to address the complexity inherent in today's IT systems and dramatically improve their manageability. DSI will result in solutions to the challenges IT faces across all aspects of the application life cycle and across all roles within an organization.
To achieve these goals, Microsoft is making a broad set of investments across our development tools, operating systems, management tools, and applications. DSI partners are also delivering solutions to help enhance our work on the Windows platform and build interoperable solutions for heterogeneous environments.
Q2: What does DSI include?
DSI includes three key components:
1) Cross-Product Roadmap
A broad, cross-Microsoft product roadmap spans application development tools, operating systems, server applications, and management tools. Near-term deliverables include:
• Windows Update Services
• Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005
• MOM management packs for Windows Server System applications
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
2) The System Definition Model (SDM)
This model is used to create definitions of distributed systems. Using SDM, businesses can create a live blueprint of an entire system. This blueprint can be created and manipulated with various software tools and is used to define system elements and capture data pertinent to development, deployment, and operations—making it relevant across an entire IT life cycle. SDM is a core technology around which many future DSI products are being developed.
3) Broad Partner Support
Customers demand choices and have a wide variety of needs concerning their IT systems that Microsoft alone cannot satisfy. As a part of DSI, Microsoft will work broadly across the industry with independent software vendors (ISVs), independent hardware vendors (IHVs), and services partners to enable products and solutions that extend and enhance Microsoft platforms and products.
Q3: How did DSI originate?
During the mid-1990s, a team from Microsoft Research began to examine the operational challenges faced by customers in medium- to large-sized data centers. Their goal was to understand the core drivers of the overwhelming complexity that existed in these environments and architect a software solution that would help dramatically reduce the associated operating costs.
With this deep understanding of customer issues, the team began to focus on creating a platform and enabling a set of software solutions to solve the underlying customer problems. These efforts were the core drivers behind DSI.
Q4: What is the System Definition Model (SDM)?
SDM is a model that is used to create definitions of distributed systems. Simply defined, a distributed system is a set of related software or hardware resources working together to accomplish a common function. Multi-tier line-of-business (LOB) applications, Web services, e-commerce sites, and enterprise data centers are examples of systems.
Using SDM, businesses can create a live blueprint of an entire system. This blueprint can be created and manipulated with various software tools and is used to define system elements and capture data pertinent to development, deployment, and operations—making it relevant across the entire IT life cycle.
Q5: What products will SDM be supported in?
SDM will be supported in a range of products from Microsoft and third parties.
1) Design and development tools that support SDM enable IT professionals to encode their IT policies and standards in software so that they can provide explicit requirements to application development teams. Application developers can also use SDM to encode operational requirements within applications and validate those requirements at design time, ensuring that the policies and standards supplied by the IT are met.
2) New and existing server applications that support SDM can be deployed and configured automatically.
3) Operating systems that support SDM can automate the deployment of an application and all of its underlying hardware and software resources-and keep track of those resources by application.
4) Hardware that supports SDM can be provisioned more dynamically and managed as a component of a larger distributed system within an IT infrastructure.
5) Management products and solutions that support SDM can provide centralized management of a distributed application and all of its underlying resources. Customers can now manage, troubleshoot, and enable policies to drive overall applications, not just individual components of the application.
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