Kilimanjaro to deliver Application and Multi-server Management
The PASS Summit Conference is in full swing here in Seattle. During Ted Kummert’s keynote at PASS, Microsoft announced future capabilities for application and multi-server management as part of the SQL Server code-name “Kilimanjaro” release.
Customers are faced with challenges around managing physical resources, communication between developers and DBAs, and optimizing hardware as the number of applications continues to grow at a rate greater than DBA teams can effectively support.
Microsoft’s investment in application and multi-server management will help reduce the complexity and ambiguity around developing, deploying, and managing applications across the application lifecycle. Through the introduction of a new application model and central management point, organizations will be able to immediately discover and manage SQL Server instances and define deployment policies to simplify database management, optimize resources, streamline collaboration, and help efficiently manage at scale.
Customers can take advantage of these capabilities incrementally:
1. Centralized management: Immediately discover and manage existing investments by placing instances and data-tier application components under central management. DBAs can begin to centrally set policies for those instances placed under management.
2. Seamless Collaboration: A new application model enables developers to define deployment and capacity policies for their application and bundle these with the database schema as a deployable package. This deployable package helps ensure information doesn’t get lost in translation from developer to DBA, reducing time-consuming deployment trial and errors for DBAs.
3. Manage Efficiently at Scale: Using Policy-Based Management (PBM), DBAs can manage applications and instances by policy. Centrally managing applications and instances by policy and dashboard viewpoints for greater insights into resource utilization will help organizations optimize their hardware investments and manage more efficiently at scale.
As customers utilize these improvements over time, they will realize incremental value throughout the application lifecycle and across their server environment. Simply tapping into the basic components of these investments will help organizations answer fundamental questions such as “what is in our environment” – something that is very manual and difficult to do today. Realizing the vision of these investments will raise the level of abstraction from a world of managing by physical assets to a world where DBAs can manage by logical or physical assets. This will allow DBAs to more proactively and easily manage resource utilization, identify issues, make moves, and perform upgrades.
Baseline functionality of application and multi-server management will be available in the Kilimanjaro timeframe, which has an expected release date of H1 2010.
The PASS 2008 event is currently being held through November 21st in Seattle, WA. To visit the SQL Server PressPass site, please click here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/sqlpass/default.mspx.
