Oslo (Microsoft) - Relationship To "Dynamic IT"

Relationship To "Dynamic IT"

SQL Server Modeling is also presently positioned as a set of modeling technologies for the .NET platform and part of the effort known as Dynamic IT. Bob Muglia, Senior Vice President for Microsoft's Server & Tools Business, has said this about Dynamic IT:

It costs customers too much to maintain their existing systems and it's not easy enough for them to build new solutions. on bringing together a cohesive solution set that enables customers to both reduce their ongoing maintenance costs while at the same time simplifying the cost of new application development so they can apply that directly to their business.

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The secret of this is end-to-end thinking, from the beginning of the development cycle all the way through to the deployment and maintenance, and all the way throughout the entire application lifecycle.

One of the pillars of this initiative is an environment that is "model-driven" wherein every critical aspect of the application lifecycle from architecture, design, and development through to deployment, maintenance, and IT infrastructure in general, is described by metadata artifacts (called "models") that are shared by all the roles at each stage in the lifecycle. This differs from the typical approach in which, as Bob Kelly, General Manager of Microsoft's Infrastructure Server Marketing group put it:

IT department and their development environment are two different silos, and the resulting effect of that is that anytime you want to deploy an application or a service, the developer builds it, throws it over the wall to IT, they try to deploy it, it breaks a policy or breaks some configuration, they hand that feedback to the developer, and so on. A very costly .

By focusing on "models"—model-based infrastructure and model-based development—we believe it enables IT to capture their policies in models and also allows the developers to capture configuration (the health of that application) in a model, then you can deploy that in a test environment very easily and very quickly (especially using virtualization). Then having a toolset like System Center that can act on that model and ensure that the application or service stays within tolerance of that model. This reduces the total cost of ownership, makes it much faster to deploy new applications and new services which ultimately drive the business, and allows for a dynamic IT environment.

To be more specific, a problem today is that data that describes an application throughout its lifecycle ends up in multiple different stores. For example:

• Planning data such as requirements, service-level agreements, and so forth, generally live in documents created by products such as Microsoft Office.
• Development data such as architecture, source code, and test suites live within a system like Microsoft Visual Studio.
• ISV data such as rules, processes modes, etc. live within custom data stores.
• Operation data such as health, policies, service-level agreements, etc., live within a management environment like Microsoft System Center.

Between these, there is little or no data sharing between the tools and runtimes involved. One of the elements of SQL Server Modeling is to concentrate this metadata into the Modeling Services database, thereby making that repository really the hub of Dynamic IT.