Network-Device Management Partnership

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.