Long-Term Plan for Manageability Announced

The Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) is a far-reaching plan to improve the manageability of Windows systems and applications. Through this initiative Microsoft hopes to provide the products, development tools, and industry leadership needed to make data centers more dynamic-that is, able to continually monitor applications and their underlying dependencies and automatically add or reallocate computing resources as needed. Coming on the heels of similar initiative announcements by IBM and Sun Microsystems, the DSI may help Microsoft strengthen its enterprise image and counteract the open-source Linux-based platform, which lacks built-in management capabilities. However, the risks are high, the details are sketchy, and the time frames are long.

Most notably, the DSI will require a new generation of application software containing self-describing resource, installation, and management requirements. The DSI will also require new hardware and could get bogged down in competing and non-interoperable standards.