Microsoft’s System Center Solutions Deliver on the Dynamic Systems Initiative
System Center Operations Manager 2007, new industry alliances, SML interoperability standard highlighted at Microsoft Management Summit 2007.
SAN DIEGO — March 27, 2007 — At the Microsoft Management Summit 2007 (MMS 2007) today, Bob Muglia, senior vice president of Server and Tools Business at Microsoft Corp., outlined how Microsoft is delivering on its Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) through investments and partnerships that advance the Microsoft® System Center family of management solutions. In his keynote address to an audience of 3,000 IT professionals, business decision-makers and partners, Muglia demonstrated several of the solutions Microsoft is delivering to help customers more effectively manage their IT environments and outlined how these solutions fit into the company’s long-term vision to help IT departments evolve from organizational cost centers to strategic business assets. With the availability of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007, Microsoft is making it easier for customers to extend and integrate IT event and performance monitoring to help improve service levels across an IT environment. After announcing the availability of System Center Operations Manager 2007, Muglia was joined onstage by Howard Elias, executive vice president of the Global Services and Resource Management Software Group at EMC Corporation. Together they unveiled a strategic technology licensing agreement and broader industry collaboration that will accelerate Microsoft’s ability to add network management capability to Operations Manager 2007 and broaden the impact of DSI in the industry. Cisco Systems Inc., Microsoft and EMC conveyed their collective commitment to creating common models for infrastructure management.
“At this event last year I described our Dynamic Systems vision; today, with the release of System Center Operations Manager 2007 and these industry partner announcements, we are able to show how we are delivering on that vision,” Muglia said. “The products we are releasing and those in the pipeline, together with the collaboration with our industry partners, will yield tremendous value for our customers in terms of management efficiency and agility.”
End-to-End Service Management With Operations Manager 2007
As a key deliverable on the company’s DSI road map, Operations Manager 2007 is an end-to-end service management solution that works seamlessly across Microsoft software and its custom line-of-business applications to deliver intelligent monitoring and reporting. With Operations Manager 2007, customers can easily identify and resolve issues, accelerate problem resolution, scale management responsibility across their infrastructure and organization, and automate routine administration to improve service levels, increase efficiencies, and achieve greater control of the IT environment.
“We are using System Center Operations Manager 2007 for service-level monitoring to understand how our services are performing and identify the bottlenecks. Operations Manager 2007 helped us pinpoint problems immediately and achieve faster time to resolution on the problems that do arise,” said Rodney Orange, supervisor of the Wintel Server Engineering team at Carnival Fun Ships. “As a result, Carnival gains a truer picture of service status, enabling us to make adjustments and address problems more quickly.”
With close to 20,000 early adopters around the world, Operations Manager 2007 leverages Microsoft and customer knowledge to proactively monitor applications, infrastructure and end-user perspectives to provide a holistic service monitoring solution. New client monitoring capabilities leverage a deep knowledge of Microsoft client operating systems and applications, including Windows® XP, Windows Vista™, Microsoft Office 2003 and the 2007 Microsoft Office system, to support proactive problem management and troubleshooting. The audit collection services feature of Operations Manager 2007 enables customers to gather security event log data from Windows systems for forensic reporting and compliance auditing. To complement the broad set of monitoring capability offered, Operations Manager 2007 also includes rich new reports and an easy-to-customize reporting environment to bring additional insight to troubleshooting and planning. Operations Manager 2007 will be generally available April 1.
Collaborating With EMC to Provide Network-Aware Service Management
As a natural extension of the deep relationship between Microsoft and EMC, Muglia and Elias announced both a technology licensing agreement and a broader technology collaboration relationship, which will result in the combination of two of the leading solutions for network and systems management to deliver true network-aware service management for customers. As part of this agreement, Microsoft will be licensing the EMC Smarts network discovery and health monitoring technology to be integrated into a future version of Operations Manager, and EMC will be developing and delivering value-added network management and root-cause analysis solutions for Operations Manager. EMC and Microsoft are also co-developing a new cross-domain behavioral model within the context of Operations Manager that will help customers pinpoint the root cause of service-affecting problems.
Delivering Knowledge-Driven Management
At MMS 2007, Microsoft will highlight progress made on its commitment to delivering a highly integrated, modular family of systems management solutions including the spring release to manufacturing (RTM) of Systems Management Server Service Pack 3 with AssetMetrix; the public availability of Data Protection Manager v2 Beta 2 within 45 days and the first public beta of Microsoft System Center Service Manager offering (formerly code named “Service Desk”) available in 30 days; the public availability of the Beta 2 release of Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager within 45 days; and the recent release of System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Beta 2 this past February. Microsoft also announced plans to build and ship an add-on that will support the 2007 Intel vPro with Intel AMT technology (code-named “Weybridge”) after the RTM of System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (SMS V4). This ensures that customers that implement and use Intel AMT and Systems Management Server 2003 are fully supported when they move to System Center Configuration Manager 2007.
Industry Collaboration on Standards and Interoperability
As organizations look to reduce maintenance costs and increase flexibility for growth, Microsoft is committed to helping customers move to dynamic infrastructures by building industry partnerships that drive better collaboration around standards and tighter interoperability between technologies.
Highlighted at the event was the recent announcement Microsoft made with industry partners that the Service Modeling Language (SML) specification has been submitted for review as an industrywide standard (http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/mar07/03-22W3CSMLPR.mspx). Based on the Microsoft System Definition Model, the submitted standard
SML is planned for inclusion across System Center to allow for the management of software and hardware that the industry is developing as well as the management of Windows systems.
Collaboration among the industry leaders was underscored when Charlie Giancarlo, chief development officer at Cisco, joined Muglia and Elias via video to jointly announce a three-way collaboration to create a set of infrastructure common models that will combine the expertise and strengths of the three companies. The goal is to help customers take advantage of SML to reduce complexity and simplify management of IT infrastructure-related tasks and resources.
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During the System Center Capacity Planner session on the System Center Airlift, Fergus Stewart disclosed some information on the next release, version 2007. You can expect the following changes:
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