Microsoft Hops Into Infrastructure 2.0
Microsoft Dynamic Infrastructure Toolkit for Systems Center (DIT-SC) is hopping forward, literally, into the network. With or without established standards, this dog is going to hunt.
It takes time to develop standards, something we often overlook. When the foundational standards upon which the Internet were being developed there were (almost) no users, no broadband, and no real urgency to get something available. The adoption of disruptive, highly volatile technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing result in an environment in which today’s standards groups are not afforded the luxury of time. Organizations want, nay they need, standards now and if they aren’t forthcoming vendors and customers alike will move steadily forward with their own implementation.
The myriad “cloud APIs” submitted to various standards organization indicate this pattern of behavior has already begun and will continue until the dust settles and one (and hopefully only one) API comes out on top. Microsoft may have come “late” to the cloud computing table, but it’s certainly making up time by moving forward with its Dynamic Infrastructure Toolkit for System Center.
The Dynamic Infrastructure Toolkit for System Center is a free, partner-extensible toolkit that will enable datacenters to dynamically pool, allocate, and manage resources to enable IT as a service. Whether you’re an enterprise customer, a systems integrator, or an independent software vendor, the toolkit will help you create agile, virtualized IT infrastructures.
What’s a bit different about Microsoft’s Dynamic Infrastructure Toolkit for System Center (DIT-SC) is that it’s not focusing on standardizing the interface to the cloud, a la Yet Another Cloud API, but rather it’s focused inward, on operations, much in the same way the cloud API of Yahoo! is highly focused on internal rather than external operations.