{"id":483,"date":"2005-10-05T12:57:00","date_gmt":"2005-10-05T12:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markwilson.me.uk\/blog\/2005\/10\/microsofts-dynamic-systems-initiative.htm"},"modified":"2007-06-11T21:30:41","modified_gmt":"2007-06-11T20:30:41","slug":"microsofts-dynamic-systems-initiative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2005\/10\/microsofts-dynamic-systems-initiative.htm","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft’s Dynamic Systems Initiative"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Microsoft Management Summit is one of Microsoft’s annual conferences and last Friday, the most popular presentations were re-run in the UK. Microsoft clearly took the event seriously, bringing across from Redmond the Corporate VP for Enterprise Management (Kirrill Tatarinov<\/a>); the Systems Management Server and Operations Manager Program Managers (Bill Anderson and Vlad Joanavic); and a Director of Product Management for Enterprise Management (Michael Emanuel).<\/p>\n

Largely due to the quality of the speakers, the event was well worth attending – particular Michael Emanuel’s Dynamic Systems Initiative<\/a> (DSI) presentation. I’ve seen DSI presentations before, but this was inspirational – largely due to the charismatic way in which he described the differences between desired and actual states as “ought-ness” and “is-ness” (with associated “was-ness”, “could-ness”, “good-ness” and “should-ness”).<\/p>\n

I’ll try to explain it all below (with a few additions from previous DSI presentations)!<\/p>\n

It is generally regarded that infrastructure costs fall rapidly whilst performance rises (a derivative of Moore’s Law<\/a>). What is less well known is that as the infrastructure costs drop, the support costs associated with supporting systems rise. Typically, 70% of an organisation’s IT budget is spent on maintenance, with just 30% on new systems. The trouble is that our increasingly well connected, but highly distributed IT systems are becoming incredibly complex. Add to that, the organisational complexity with infrastructure architects, developers, systems administrators, service architects, business stakeholders, testers, IT management and even outsourced\/offshore partners – wouldn’t it be great to do something to control the management costs and let them track the decreasing cost of the infrastructure?<\/p>\n

\"IT<\/p>\n

Businesses tend to be dynamic. All too often, IT is not. Microsoft’s answer is the DSI, which is about helping IT organisations to capture and use knowledge to design more manageable systems and automate ongoing operations, resulting in reduced costs and more time for IT to focus on what is most important to the business.<\/p>\n

It sounds logical enough… so why don’t we do this already? Basically because IT infrastructure architects and IT operations managers don’t tend to talk the same language! In general, designers think about scalability, security and identity but gloss over the management element. With 80% of the cost of a project committed by design decisions at the end of the design phase (but only 8% of the cost incurred), it is all too often too late to change things when they reach production and don’t fit well within an operational model. DSI is about encouraging a full lifecycle view so that operational awareness can be built into applications and services right from the initial design, using models to capture knowledge (i.e. bottling what is known for re-use) throughout the lifecycle.<\/p>\n

The key is that systems should be designed for operations with manageability architected into the system from the outset. To do this, there are two fundamental building blocks required:<\/p>\n