CIM Simplified Policy Language Standard Eases Automated Management

September 14, 2009, Santa Clara, Calif - Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), the industry organization bringing the IT industry together to collaborate on systems management standards development, validation, promotion and adoption, today announced the release of its Common Information Model Simplified Policy Language (CIM-SPL) standard. CIM-SPL provides a standard language for writing system management policies based on CIM profiles, enabling IT personnel to more effectively manage their computing resources.

With this standard, IT administrators are able to define rules and allocate resources within their computing systems, provide a foundation for automated systems management in distributed environments and support more efficient systems management. CIM-SPL can be used with any CIM-based implementation, including those comprising DMTF's DASH, SMASH and VMAN initiatives.

"CIM-SPL is critical for enabling organizations to take full advantage of DMTF standards for effective, interoperable IT management," said Winston Bumpus, DMTF president. "Because CIM is the basis for most DMTF standards, IT personnel can take advantage of CIM-SPL to greatly simplify the process of adding automation policies that can be integrated into a wide variety of DMTF-enabled management systems."

Within cloud computing applications CIM-SPL will help enable the automatic management of cloud systems. The concept of self-service is fundamental for the success of application in the cloud, requiring automatic deployment of resources as needed. Automation becomes essential in this environment. CIM-SPL can be used to create policies that support automation of these management tasks.

With CIM-SPL, management applications using CIM can add-on the CIM policy engine to automatically control and configure parts of the IT domain. This enables IT administrators to automate their departments using CIM-SPL without the need to engage and manage additional resources, saving time and money.

The Common Information Model (CIM) was originally developed in 1997 as a conceptual model to describe the components of managed computing and networking environments. Since then CIM has expanded to new markets and has become one of the most widely implemented system and network management information models. CIM has been the basis for many of the DMTF standards.

DMTFs CIM-SPL specification is available for download here

About DMTF DMTF enables more effective management of millions of IT systems worldwide by bringing the IT industry together to collaborate on the development, validation and promotion of systems management standards. The group spans the industry with 160 member companies and organizations, and more than 4,000 active participants crossing 43 countries. The DMTF board of directors is led by 16 innovative, industry-leading technology companies. They include Advanced Micro Devices (AMD); Broadcom Corporation; CA; Citrix; Dell; EMC; Fujitsu; HP; Hitachi, Ltd.; IBM; Intel Corporation; Microsoft Corporation; Novell; Oracle; Sun Microsystems, Inc.; and VMware. With this deep and broad reach, DMTF creates standards that enable interoperable IT management. DMTF management standards are critical to enabling management interoperability among multi-vendor systems, tools and solutions within the enterprise. Information about DMTF technologies and activities can be found at http://www.dmtf.org.