Gaining control of complexity

The standard for the data center This document describes the data center markup language (DCML), a structured XML-based format for describing the contents of data centers and the policies governing the management of those contents. DCML describes blueprints for constructing managed environments, the knowledge necessary to turn those blueprints into an environment instance and the resulting environment. Introduction 1 New methods and approaches 1 Introduction to DCML 1 Why a standard? 2 Comparison to traditional approaches 2 Related standards 3 DCML concepts 3 Security 4 Overview of the DCML specifications 4 XML representation of DCML 4 Future DCML work 4 2 < 1 > technical white paper These new approaches brought with them new requirements, on behalf of customers, for vendor independence and interoperability. Just as traditional management approaches led to the development of standards such as Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and Common Information Model (CIM) for interoperable network monitoring and management applications, today's new automated management approaches require standards that support interoperability among solutions. The data center markup language (DCML) is a proposal for one such standard. In the automated data center, there is a need for a standard format to describe the contents of the data center and the policies governing the construction and management of that content. This need is evident in a number of scenarios: • Construction and change – Customers often need to build or rebuild the full or partial contents of data centers. The build case occurs when new applications or infrastructure are deployed, during technology refresh cycles and when increasing the capacity of existing applications. The rebuild case occurs during disaster recovery, data center consolidation and migration, and during simple system recovery. • Automated implementation of these scenarios requires two things. First is a comprehensive blueprint of the environment to be built. Hardware requirements, software components and configurations, networking and storage – all must be specified to facilitate automation. Furthermore, New methods and approaches The information technology (IT) approach to managing the data center has not kept pace with these changes. IT departments are still using methods developed when data centers were significantly less complex. These methods rely on armies of experts to make manual changes to the environment and react to problems after they occur. The result for IT has been a staggering increase in cost and decrease in quality. Traditional data center management tools such as monitoring have not kept …