Tech leaders release new spec to simplify IT management

BEA, BMC, Cisco, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Sun announced they have published a draft of a new specification that defines a consistent way to express how computer networks, applications, servers and other IT resources are described—or modeled—in XML so businesses can more easily manage the services which are built on these resources.

The collaboration resulted into a specification which defines a common language for expressing information about IT resources and services. The Service Modeling Language (SML) enables a hierarchy of IT resource models to be created from reusable building blocks, rather than requiring custom descriptions of every service, which helps reduce costs and system complexity for customers.

The group plans to submit the draft specification to an industry standards organization later this year.

According to the press release, SML addresses a growing industry need as a result of the numerous ways to represent the same IT resource. The use of different formats leads to two problems—because the tools and management applications use different formats, they don't speak the same language and the use of different formats may require IT architects to use written descriptions or sketches to convey information about resources.

SML has two unique properties that make it suitable for modeling IT resources and services: support for rich constraints and alignment with XML message exchange architectures. The new specification also allows developers to build modeling information for applications, devices and services that can be used during all stages of the application or service lifecycle including configuration, problem, change and release management. This common modeling language is an important step in simplifying IT management in multi-vendor environments, providing a way for information to be shared across diverse tools and applications.

In addition to the publication of the SML specifications, the companies also announced their intent to explore development of a library of core models to describe generic resources such as network elements, operating systems, storage devices, desktops, server systems, web servers, a directory service and more.