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DMTF ANNOUNCES NEW WORKING GROUP FOR UTILITY COMPUTING

Distributed Management Task Force Inc (DMTF) announced the formation of the new Utility Computing Working Group, which will create interoperable and common object models for utility computing services within the DMTF's Common Information Model (CIM). Active participants in the working group include Cisco Systems, EMC, HP, IBM, Oracle Corp, Sun Microsystems Inc and VERITAS Corp, with the full support of the DMTF's more than 110 member companies.

The DMTF Utility Computing Working Group will operate in close collaboration with other organizations, like the Global Grid Forum (GGF) and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) Technical Committee, to develop standards related to utility computing. The result of this collaboration is to unify the industry on a set of highly functional and extensible management interfaces, enabling multiple vendors to interoperate and fulfill customer requirements for greater management automation. Improved multi-vendor integration will ultimately reduce the costs related to the management of IT resources.

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"Management plays a central role in utility computing, and DMTF's CIM is already being used to address this space," said Todd Guay of Oracle Corp, vice president of technology for the DMTF. "The new DMTF Utility Computing Working Group will bring together the leaders of the industry to develop further improvements to CIM, meeting IT needs in this important and evolving area."

"This is an important activity and we are excited to see the DMTF bring this group together, while simultaneously tapping related efforts, such as GGF's Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) and several new GGF research groups focused on commercial enterprise Grid application use cases and requirements," said Charlie Catlett, senior fellow at Argonne National Laboratory and chair of GGF. "The collaboration will deliver the usability the industry requires, and provide standards that capitalize on existing efforts to deliver the management capabilities that will be essential to creating the tools and frameworks necessary for utility computing."

"The DMTF is responding to a critical need for usable models and common, interoperable standards for the management industry and now for utility computing," said Heather Kreger of IBM, co-chair of the OASIS Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) Technical Committee. "Collaborating with the OASIS WSDM Technical Committee and other groups on standards development will result in standards that converge to address end-to-end management needs. The OASIS WSDM Technical Committee will be appointing liaisons to the DMTF's Utility Computing Working Group, and we look forward to helping meet the needs of the industry through this effort."

The DMTF Utility Computing Working Group will define how to assemble complete service definitions. This will include work on the composition of the models in CIM, as well as business- and domain-specific functional interfaces. This working group will also render the utility computing classes of CIM in Unified Modeling Language (UML).