In a type of deal that's fairly rare for Microsoft, the company announced at the Mar. 2007 Microsoft Management Summit that it has licensed components of EMC's Smarts network-device management technology for inclusion in a future version of Operations Manager (OM), Microsoft's product for monitoring the health of computers, OS services, and applications. Smarts is an EMC product family that excels at monitoring and troubleshooting network devices, such as switches and routers, an area where OM 2007 has only limited monitoring capabilities.

As part of a broader partnership agreement, both EMC and Cisco announced they would join Microsoft and IBM in a new industry working group to establish a standardized Core Model Library (CML) written in Service Modeling Language (SML). Microsoft plans to use the CML in future versions of Microsoft System Center products, including OM and Configuration Manager, the successor to Systems Management Server.

What Is Smarts?

Rooted in monitoring of network devices supporting the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), EMC's Smarts has evolved into a family of monitoring products that covers servers, networked storage, and even applications. Although Microsoft seldom licenses technology from competitors for inclusion in its own products, Microsoft is licensing EMC's Smarts technologies for network topology discovery and monitoring of network devices. This technology includes a library of models that represent the behavior of common network devices. More than just aiding discovery of existing network devices, these models allow Smarts to automatically discover and maintain an up-to-date map of network topology. Although these models are proprietary to Smarts and are not written in SML, the technology's use of systems management models is similar to the models used by OM 2007.

The Smarts product is also innovative in that it avoids the classic "brute force" method for performing root cause problem determination. This traditional method requires substantial manual labor to write rules that define the cause-and-effect relationships between the customer's actual network components, and to maintain those rules as network components are added or removed from the system. Instead, EMC appears to use some sort of proprietary statistical analysis using historical event data collected from the devices and the generic modeled behavior of the discovered network devices to arrive at a "probable cause." This technique is not always perfect but is much less onerous to maintain, and it has the added benefit of not necessarily requiring SNMP access (at time of network failure) to the device that was ultimately responsible for the failure.

Microsoft's IT department has been using the Smarts product for many years now and feels it represents best-of-breed technology for managing network devices.

Fit with Operations Manager 2007

Although OM 2007 can discover SNMP network devices, that's the full extent of the network device management functionality customers get out of the box. OM 2007 cannot discover network topology, nor can other OM management packs (MPs) determine their dependencies on the network devices discovered. OM 2007 does not include prebuilt OM management packs for monitoring SNMP devices; customers must either build their own or obtain them from vendors or others. (At present, no OM 2007 MPs are available for any SNMP devices.)

In May 2007, EMC will ship an update to its Smarts connector for OM, which will allow Smarts alerts caused by network device failures to flow into the OM 2007 operator's console, thereby allowing operators to see those alerts on the OM console alongside the health status of OS and application software. However, this solution is still unable to associate failures in the network to failures of system services and applications dependent on that network. Furthermore, the OM and Smart infrastructures must exist in parallel; the Smarts console and servers are required in addition to the OM console and servers.

Fit with Future Versions

Although the joint announcement said that the Smarts technology would be included in "a future version" of OM, it's highly probable this means the next release of OM, because OM 2007 just shipped. The two companies envision that some parts of the Smarts technology will be integrated into OM and some will continue to be sold by EMC.

Microsoft and EMC will rewrite the existing Smarts network device library as SML. The schema used will be derived from the base network-device models being developed by the CML Working Group.

The future version of OM will ship with a network-device MP that contains those new models, which will allow OM to discover network topology and enable MPs of systems services and applications to discover which, if any, network devices they depend on. Neither Microsoft nor EMC indicated whether the new MP will be limited to monitoring or will provide support for making configuration changes to the devices, such as adding a static route or changing an IP address.

However, the future version of OM will not include the Smarts analytical engine for performing root cause analysis. Instead, EMC will develop and sell a separate root-cause analysis MP and other "specialized behavior model" MPs for performing other types of higher-level network analysis from within the OM console.

The converged product will no longer require a separate Smarts infrastructure, console, and connector; all functionality will be built on the OM platform.

This solution will undoubtedly put pressure on dedicated network management platforms, such as Hewlett-Packard's OpenView, and will likely harm partners, such as Jalasoft, that have built a network management product designed specifically to integrate with OM. It also makes it unlikely that other third parties will be interested in building MPs that exploit OM 2007's SNMP device management feature, since that will come native in a future version of OM.

Resources

A datasheet for EMC Smarts can be found at www.emc.com/solutions/microsoft/opsmgr/pdf/SmartsforMS_OperationsMgr2007_so_ldv.pdf.

Microsoft's Operations Manager site is at www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/opsmgr.