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Announcing Indy (and other news from MMS 2004)

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Well, our demo's not till tomorrow, but apparently "sources close to the company" (and I have my guesses as to who they are :-)) have already been talking to the analysts. Mary Jo Foley gets it pretty much exactly right in Modeling the Datacenter With Microsoft 'Indy':

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Code-named "Indy," the new management product is a capacity-planning and performance-modeling tool. Indy simulates an enterprise datacenter by modeling a customer's hardware, software and server systems. Indy was developed by Microsoft Research and is now being commercialized by Microsoft's enterprise management division.

Also, kudos to Mary Jo for doing her groundwork and finding our old Microsoft Research page! Unfortunately Steve Ballmer's cancelled for tomorrow's keynote, but his place will be taken by Kirill Tatarinov, the VP of our enterprise management division and a real champion for Indy. I'm sure our demo segment will go smoothly... fingers crossed... toes crossed... NO NO DON'T PRESS THAT BUTTON...

On to the rest of the news from MMS 2004 - I'm summarizing from today's press release and Peter Galli's analysis for eWeek.

  • We're very big on the Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI). Think of "DSI" as being like ".NET", in that it's an umbrella term used to refer to a bunch of new stuff that has a common theme. Hopefully we won't repeat the same branding mistakes! Here's the official DSI home page.
  • One specific deliverable for the DSI is the System Definition Model (SDM), an XML-based modeling language used to describe everything from applications to datacenters, and (most importantly!) how they interact. Continuing the analogy, if DSI is .NET, then SDM is IL: all of our tools to develop, deploy, and manage applications will generate, consume, and manipulate SDM.
  • SUS is now WUS. That is, Software Update Services is now Windows Update Services, and handles SQL, Exchange, and Office 2003, in addition to those pesky Windows clients. And why do you want WUS? First, it provides basic patch management across an organization. Second, it's free.
  • SMS 2003, which provides definitely-not-just-basic patch management across an organization, can now manage mobile devices and do bare-metal installs - seriously cool stuff.
  • The artist formerly known as MOM 2004 is now MOM 2005 - it's still going out this year, but in the second half - and has just entered its final beta cycle. And there are a whole bunch of 3rd-party add-ons to let MOM play nicely with Siebel, Veritas, IBM Tivoli, HP OpenView, etc.
  • We're announcing MOM 2005 Express - no, no, not "Lite", "Express" :-) It provides basic monitoring capabilities across an organization, and it runs all MOM management packs. Unlike SUS it's not free, but it is "low cost".

Ok, I think that's it for tonight - the cold medicine is definitely kicking in now...

[Edited - sorry, that BLOCKQUOTE seemed to mess up .Text's idea of my left margin...]