Forster: How does DSI differentiate System Center products
from third-party products?
Tatarinov: All the System Center products share DSI-based characteristics:
First is ease of use (and I put ease of deployment in the same category). Management
products have been hard to use and learn and require significant consulting
engagements before they can be deployed and scaled. This is something we've
tried to reduce.
Second, System Center products are driven by knowledge that we assembled from
the industry and from focusing on our customers. For example, we worked to understand
the backup and restore needs of our SQL Server, Exchange Server, and SharePoint
customer base. We also spent time with Exchange customers to understand what
they need to proactively correct errors with as little downtime and manual intervention
as necessary. The knowledge we gained has manifested in the System Center products
and is a critical attribute and differentiator for our products.
Third is scalability. We scale up to the largest enterprises out there and
down to the smallest organizations. Scalability up and down is an important
differentiator.
Operations Manager
Forster: System Center Operations Manager 2007 (Ops Manager),
the successor to Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), is the first product to
be renamed under the new brand. How does it incorporate DSI?
Tatarinov: With System Center Operations Manager coming out in April,
customers can take advantage of the model-based management approach and apply
it to management of services. You will be able to define the model of a service
and manage that service the same way end users see that service.
Orecklin: Historically, the industry focused on monitoring things—the
server, the application. But it's crucial to look end-to-end at how to deploy,
manage, and monitor a service. Take messaging, for example: I care about my
Exchange server, the network, my SAN, and AD. I need to ensure that each component
is being managed and monitored but also that they all roll up to provide an
end-to-end view of the entire messaging service. To do service-level monitoring,
[Ops Manager has] new views, templates, and wizards to easily define and create
a template out of the box. That includes management packs for all Microsoft
components, as well as for our partners' on hardware, network, storage, and
so on.
Next, you can capture knowledge about the desired state and health of an application
and easily monitor and manage that over time. Inline tasks are right in the
UI when things go wrong, and all the knowledge base associated with that application
is right there. We've also extended the concept of knowledge down to the client.
When errors occur, we can capture knowledge about an application, OS, or hardware
from clients. You can view client information at the enterprise level or at
the group level and link to the Microsoft Knowledge Base. You don't have to
wait for a user to call about a problem on a machine.
The least intrusive level of client management is agentless exception monitoring.
The applications surface up their events so the customer can monitor and report
trends. We also have client management packs for Windows Vista and Office 2007
so we can actively monitor and manage business-critical clients.
Configuration Manager
Forster: System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (SCCM), the
next release, is currently in private beta and goes to public beta in early
Q2 of 2007. RTM is set for summer or early autumn of 2007. How does SCCM
fit in the DSI picture?
Tatarinov: Customers get the ability to use SCCM as their definition
and enforcement mechanism to apply a model-based approach to defining the desired
state of their environment and making sure that environment stays consistent
with their desire.
Orecklin: Desired-configuration management (DCM) is where the notion
of knowledge and models comes into play. You can use modeling to define the
desired state of a client and an application and then monitor that over time
to identify drift from the desired state. From a security and compliance perspective
you need to monitor and manage drift and either automatically update or take
an action.
Obviously, this is a big year with Vista, Office, and Longhorn Server coming
out, and companies are looking for help. SCCM's first focus is radically simplifying
OS deployment. In the past, this has been a complex and manually intensive process.
We provide a single integrated tool for each OS image "instance." For example,
SCCM provides an integrated view of desktops, laptops, and servers. We found
that many customers are maintaining dozens or hundreds of OS images because
of varying hardware driver sets. SCCM provides a Driver Library so that IT can
decouple the drivers from the core image, significantly reducing the number
of OS images necessary to maintain their user base. In addition, preparing an
OS image for deployment revolves around dozens of individual tasks such as configuring
security settings, joining domains, and so on. So we developed a new feature
called the Task Sequencer in which dozens of tasks are available and an administrator
can drag and drop tasks in the correct sequence for each user set. Finally,
customers asked us to improve ease of use and reduce complexity. For example,
deploying a patch in an enterprise with SMS could take as many as 18 screens.
With SCCM, that's down to as few as six mouse clicks.
System Center Essentials
Forster: Readers in small and medium-sized organizations
tell me they are excited about System Center Essentials (SCE), which is slated
to ship in the first quarter of 2007.
Tatarinov: SCE plays into a market where customers have fewer than
500 PCs. This market segment has been underserved historically. People are starving
for a solution. We talked about different personas. This person has to deal
with every aspect of IT, and we want to enable that person to do everything
with a simple, easy-to-use interface. SCE will enable that person to easily
configure devices—be it servers or desktops—and distribute software
to those devices. SCE also lets this person monitor network, servers, and devices
in a very simple way.
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